Mapping female bodily features of attractiveness

Abstract

"Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye" (Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost), but the bodily features governing this critical biological choice are still debated. Eye movement studies have demonstrated that males sample coarse body regions expanding from the face, the breasts and the midriff, while making female attractiveness judgements with natural vision. However, the visual system ubiquitously extracts diagnostic extra-foveal information in natural conditions, thus the visual information actually used by men is still unknown. We thus used a parametric gaze-contingent design while males rated attractiveness of female front- and back-view bodies. Males used extra-foveal information when available. Critically, when bodily features were only visible through restricted apertures, fixations strongly shifted to the hips, to potentially extract hip-width and curvature, then the breast and face. Our hierarchical mapping suggests that the visual system primary uses hip information to compute the waist-to-hip ratio and the body mass index, the crucial factors in determining sexual attractiveness and mate selection.

Figure 1. Front views of one stimulus on the two Spotlight conditions, with gaze-contingent apertures of 4° (first column) and 2° (second column) centered on the face (first row) and on the navel (second row).

The aperture of 2° covered the entire face, but the edges of the torso were not visible when fixating the navel. The aperture 4° allowed one to simultaneously see the edges of both sides of the torso when fixating the navel. Images generated with the software MakeHuman, under a PDD licence (public domain).

Figure 2. Front- and back-views of a stimulus under the natural viewing condition.

Images generated with the software MakeHuman, under a PDD licence (public domain).

Figure 3. Estimated 2D coefficient (β) maps and their local maximum on the face and hip areas for each categorical predictor of the LMM (Eq. 2).

Line plots of the beta values were extracted from the x axis containing the local maxima for the face and hip regions. The 95% confidence intervals are reported in the grey areas.

Figure 4. Left panel: difference fixation maps performed on the LMM (Eq. 2) between the front view 2° spotlight and natural viewing conditions.

Significant clusters are outlined with black lines. Right panel: normalized contrast among the three viewing conditions within different region masks from Left panel. Error bars report standard errors. Image generated with the software MakeHuman, under a PDD licence (public domain).