This experiment was about how looking at faces with different characteristics affects your judgments about how normal faces look. Gillian Rhodes and colleagues have shown that viewing faces with contracted or expanded features makes other faces with those same manipulations seem more ‘normal’. This effect is called adaptation.
In our face adaptation experiment. we adapted participants to either male or female faces with eyes that were either very far apart or very close together.
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| Eyes very close together | Eyes close together | Eyes far apart | Eyes very far apart |
We were trying to determine whether adaptation to male and female faces affects the same mental representation or separate mental representations. If, after you viewed men with wide-set eyes and women with close-set eyes, you found men with wide-set eyes more normal-looking and women with close-set eyes more normal-looking, it would be evidence that your brain processes male and female faces separately. If you did not differentiate male an female faces, then exposure to men with wide-set eyes and women with close-set eyes would cancel each other out and your perceptions of normality would not change after exposure.
Average percent that wide-set eyes were perceived as more normal than close-set eyes
in male and female faces after different exposure conditions
| Condition | Female | Male |
|---|---|---|
| Female close-set Male wide-set |
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| 50% | 63% | |
| Female wide-set Male close-set |
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| 60% | 54% |
The results of the experiment showed that people must process male and female faces separately.
- (2002). Fitting the mind to the world: Face Adaptation and Attractiveness Aftereffects. Psychological Science, 14: 558-566.
- (2005). Sex-contingent face aftereffects suggest distinct neural populations code male and female faces. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B, 272: 2283-2287.