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

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Hauptverfasser: Riedmann, Frederik, Egger, Bernhard, Rohe, Tim
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Riedmann, Frederik
Egger, Bernhard
Rohe, Tim
author_facet Riedmann, Frederik
Egger, Bernhard
Rohe, Tim
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_15443
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revealing an Unattractivity Bias in Mental Reconstruction of Occluded Faces using Generative Image Models
Riedmann, Frederik
Egger, Bernhard
Rohe, Tim
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.4.5; I.4.9; I.2.10; J.4
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.
title Revealing an Unattractivity Bias in Mental Reconstruction of Occluded Faces using Generative Image Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.4.5; I.4.9; I.2.10; J.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.15443