Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research has found that people are seen as moreattractive when they appear in a group rather than in isolation.The present study asks whether faces that surround us in timealso affect how attractive we appear to be. Participants ratedthe attractiveness of famous female faces presented in asequence of three and in isolation. We found that people dointegrate information about attractiveness over time, but thattemporal context has the opposite effect of static context.People perceived faces as less attractive in a series than inisolation. We also varied the attractiveness of surroundingfaces in order to examine how the serial position of contextualinformation might figure into people’s judgments. We foundthat faces presented earlier in the sequence figured moreheavily into people’s judgment than did faces presented laterin the sequence. These findings highlight the role of temporalcontext in perceptions of attractiveness.