Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research has found that people are seen as more attractive when they appear in a group rather than inisolation. Do faces that surround us in time also affect how attractive we seem? Participants rated the attractiveness of famousfemale faces presented in a sequence of three and in isolation. We found that people do integrate information about attractivenessover time, but that temporal context has the opposite effect of static context. People perceived faces as less attractive in a seriesthan when those same faces were presented in isolation. We also varied the attractiveness of surrounding faces in order toexamine how the serial position of contextual information figures into people’s judgments of a face. Faces presented early inthe sequence figured more heavily into people’s judgments than did faces presented at the end. These findings highlight therole that temporal context plays in the perception of attractiveness.