ToK – Perception of Facial Beauty

Introduction:


        Studies show that people everywhere all show a common sense for what is attractive, no matter what race, class or age. Face perception is a highly complex visual skill. Visual aesthetic perception or the ability to visually recognize a particular attribute such as form, colour, and movement is processed in the brain. The prefrontal brain expansion is said to be responsible although no current knowledge exists on the role of prefrontal areas in the aesthetic perception.

        Neurologists have studied the localization of brain areas activated during the visual perception of aesthetic objects. When people were asked to decide whether something was beautiful or not beautiful the participant’s brain activity was recorded and the tracings showed a striking difference between attractive and unattractive conditions. Which means facial beauty can perhaps be considered as an attribute perceived by the brain’s processing system.

        It is also said that a factor for attractiveness is symmetry. Humans show a preference for individuals whose right side matches their left (in other words, paired features such as eyes, ears and symmetrical nose/mouth matching perfectly). We don’t really think or notice it, but strangely enough, it may be true.

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Has anyone ever heard of prosopagnosia, also “Facial Blindness”? It is the

  • inability to recognize familiar faces, including family members or their own
  • results from head trauma, inflammation of the brain, stroke, comas, insufficient oxygen supply at birth
  • results in inability to properly extract and integrate information they see in a face, so they rely on other characteristics, such as hair, body shape and gait to recognize people
  • research project conducted heterosexual men and women prosopagnosics ranging in age from 20s to 60s, were shown 80 anonymous male and female faces, both average and attractive, and asked to ...

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