RESEARCH INTERESTS
Faces are fascinating to most people, because they are so rich in social information. They signal a person?s identity, feelings, age, sex, ethnicity and attractiveness. How do we read all this information in faces? And how does this information guide our interactions with others? In the FaceLab, we are studying perceptual, cognitive, neural, evolutionary and social aspects of face processing. Current projects are concentrated in three main areas:
Attractiveness: Adaptive Significance and Cognitive Mechanisms
We are investigating what makes faces and bodies attractive and how our perceptions of beauty may have been shaped by human evolutionary history. We aim to determine whether preferences for averageness, symmetry and sexual dimorphism are biologically based standards of beauty and whether cognitive mechanisms might also contribute to them. We are also investigating whether attractive traits reflect aspects of mate quality, such as health, fertility and genetic diversity.
Face Expertise and the Other-Race Effect
We are all face experts, with a remarkable ability to distinguish thousands of faces, despite their similarity as visual patterns. However, we are more expert with some faces than others. For example, people often lack expertise with other-race faces and find them difficult to recognize. We are currently studying the perceptual, cognitive and motivational bases of this well-known other-race effect. We are also studying how people acquire expertise with other-race faces when they move to a new country.
Applying the Psychologist's Microelectrode to High-Level Vision: Face aftereffects reveal face coding mechanisms
Aftereffects have been called the psychologist?s microelectrode because they can reveal perceptual coding mechanisms. Recently, a variety of aftereffects have been discovered in the perception of faces and bodies. For example, briefly viewing a face biases us to see the opposite characteristics in subsequently viewed faces, suggesting that a face?s appearance is coded as deviations from an average face or norm. Viewing consistently distorted faces rapidly changes what looks normal and attractive, suggesting that face norms are continuously updated by the diet of faces that we see. Similar aftereffects have been found in the perception of body norms and ideals. We are currently using these aftereffects to explore how we perceive and respond to faces and bodies.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Books
Clifford, C. W. G., & Rhodes, G. (Eds.) (2005). Fitting the mind to the world: Adaptation and aftereffects in high-level vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peterson, M.. P., & Rhodes, G. (Eds.) (2003). Perception of faces, objects and scenes: Analytic and holistic processing. Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press.
Rhodes, G., & Zebrowitz, L. A. (Eds.) (2002). Facial attractiveness: Evolutionary, cognitive and social perspectives. Westport, CT: Ablex.
Rhodes, G. (1996). Superportraits: Caricatures and recognition. Hove: The Psychology Press.
Selected Recent Articles
Rhodes. G. (2006). The evolution of facial attractiveness. Annual Review of Psychology, in press.
Leopold, D. A., Rhodes, G., Müller, K-M & Jeffery, L. (2005). The dynamics of visual adaptation to faces. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 272, 897?904.
Rhodes, G., Peters, M., Lee, K., Morrone, C. M., & Burr, D. (2005). Higher-level mechanisms detect facial symmetry. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 272, 1379-1384.
Rhodes, G. Simmons, L., & Peters, M. (2005). Attractiveness and sexual behavior: Does attractiveness enhance mating success? Evolution & Human Behavior, 26, 186-201.
Rhodes, G., Byatt, G., Michie, P. T., & Puce, A. (2004). Is the fusiform face area specialized for faces, individuation or expert individuation? Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16, 1-15.
Rhodes, G., Jeffery, L., Watson, T., Jaquet, E., Winkler, C., Clifford, C. W. G. (2004). Orientation-contingent face aftereffects and implications for face coding mechanisms. Current Biology, 14, 2119-2123. |
