Revealing an Unattractivity Bias in Mental Reconstruction of Occluded Faces using Generative Image Models

TL;DR

This study investigates whether mental reconstruction biases face attractiveness ratings and finds evidence of an unattractiveness bias in reconstructed occluded faces, challenging previous assumptions about attractiveness perception.

Contribution

The paper provides experimental evidence that mental reconstruction of occluded faces is biased towards unattractiveness, contradicting prior hypotheses of attractiveness bias in face perception.

Findings

Unattractiveness bias observed in reconstructed occluded faces

Attractiveness ratings may be influenced by global image features

Mental reconstruction does not necessarily enhance attractiveness

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that faces are rated as more attractive when they are partially occluded. The cause of this observation remains unclear. One explanation is a mental reconstruction of the occluded face parts which is biased towards a more attractive percept as shown in face-attractiveness rating tasks. We aimed to test for this hypothesis by using a delayed matching-to-sample task, which directly requires mental reconstruction. In two online experiments, we presented observers with unattractive, neutral or attractive synthetic reconstructions of the occluded face parts using a state-of-the-art diffusion-based image generator. Our experiments do not support the initial hypothesis and reveal an unattractiveness bias for occluded faces instead. This suggests that facial attractiveness rating tasks do not prompt reconstructions. Rather, the attractivity bias may arise from global image features, and faces may actually be reconstructed with unattractive properties when mental reconstruction is applied.