Data from: The boundary of holistic processing in the appraisal of facial attractiveness

Facial attractiveness is often studied on the basis of the internal facial features alone. This study investigated how this exclusion of the external features affects the perception of attractiveness. We studied the effects of two most commonly used methods of exclusion, where the shape of an occluding mask was defined by either the facial outline or an oval. Participants rated attractiveness of the same faces under these conditions. Results showed that faces were consistently rated more attractive when they were masked by an oval shape rather than by their outline (Experiment 1). Attractive faces were more strongly affected by this effect than were less attractive faces when participants were able to control the viewing time. However, unattractive faces benefited more from this effect when the same face stimuli were presented briefly for only 20 ms (Experiment 2). Further manipulation confirmed that the effect was mainly due to the occlusion of a larger area of the external features rather than the regular and symmetrical features of the oval shape (Experiment 3) or lacks contextual cues about the face boundary (Experiment 4). The effect was only relative to masked faces, with no advantage over unmasked faces (Experiment 5), and is likely a result of the interaction between the shape of a mask and the internal features of the face. This holistic effect in the appraisal of facial attractiveness is striking because the oval shape of the mask is not a part of the face but is the edge of an occluding object.

面部吸引力的相关研究通常仅基于面部内部特征展开。本研究旨在探究这种排除外部特征的处理方式，会对吸引力感知产生何种影响。我们针对两种最常用的特征排除方法开展了研究：二者分别以面部轮廓（facial outline）或椭圆形（oval）定义遮挡遮罩（occluding mask）的形状。研究人员让被试对上述两种条件下的同一张面部刺激（face stimuli）的吸引力进行评分。实验1结果显示，相较于以面部轮廓作为遮罩形状的条件，使用椭圆形遮罩时，被试对人脸吸引力的评分普遍更高。当被试可自主控制观看时长时，高吸引力人脸受到该遮罩效应的影响程度显著高于低吸引力人脸；而当面部刺激仅短暂呈现20毫秒时，低吸引力人脸反而从该效应中获益更多（实验2）。后续的变量操控实验证实，该效应主要源于遮罩遮挡了更大范围的面部外部特征，而非源于椭圆形遮罩本身的规整对称形态（实验3），亦非因为缺失面部边界的语境线索（实验4）。该效应仅存在于被遮罩的人脸刺激中，相较于未被遮罩的人脸并无评分优势（实验5），其本质可能是遮罩形状与面部内部特征之间的交互作用所导致的。这一针对面部吸引力评估的整体加工效应十分显著，原因在于遮罩的椭圆形并非人脸本身的组成部分，而仅是遮挡物的边缘轮廓。

搜集汇总

背景与挑战

背景概述

该数据集源自一项研究，探讨了在面部吸引力评估中排除外部特征（如使用遮罩）如何影响感知，通过五个实验数据展示了遮罩形状（如椭圆形比面部轮廓更能提高吸引力评分）与内部特征的交互作用，揭示了整体处理效应的边界。数据集包含Excel文件，涵盖实验数据，主题涉及外部特征、内部特征和整体处理。