Categorical perception of human female physical attractiveness and health.pdf

Evolution and Human Behavior 33 (2012) 85–93Original Article Categorical perception of human female physical attractiveness and health Martin J. Tovée?, Laura Edmonds, Quoc C. Vuong Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University, NE2 4HH, UK Initial receipt 2 February 2010; final revision received 24 May 2011Abstract Using realistic three-dimensional female body models, we found evidence for a categorical perception of female physical attractiveness and health in male and female Caucasian observers. In a rating task, we showed that these bodies were rated for attractiveness or health in the same way as real bodies. In a two-alternative forced-choice task, we showed that these bodies were categorized into attractive vs. unattractive or healthy vs. unhealthy nonlinearly, which allowed us to estimate the position of a categorical boundary between attractive and unattractive or healthy and unhealthy bodies. In a delayed match-to-sample task, we measured the sensitivity of discrimination between pairs of bodies. We found significantly better discrimination for pairs that crossed the attractive/unattractive or healthy/unhealthy boundary than pairs that did not, even though the physical changes in both conditions were identical. Thus, categorical perception enhances the perception of physical changes that cross the boundary between discrete perceptual categories of important judgments such as attractiveness or health, which can be a cue for mate selection. ? 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Keywords: Categorical perception; Attractiveness; Female bodies1. Introduction One of the most fundamental problems facing individuals is mate selection. Thus, it is important that they have a means to efficiently evaluate the attractiveness of potential partners because the wrong choice will have a negative impact on their reproductive success (Buss, 2006; Zebrowitz Rhodes, 2002). As attractiveness can be a cue to fitness and reproductive potential, we might expect very strong