Theories of Feature Processing: Contra. There are however many objections to a simple feature based approach to the decoding of attractiveness. One of them is based on our cognitive abilities: we are able to decode sex and attractiveness in a very short time. 100 msec of stimulus presentation is enough for reliable decoding. In this short time no feature analysis is possible, there must be some type of "Gestalt" or "Prototype" perception on a very low level of sensory integration and computation. The Attractive Prototype: Faces. What could the "Gestalt" we use for attractiveness and beauty decoding then be? A basic feature of human cognition is the creation of "prototypes". This means that we constantly evaluate stimuli from our social and non-social environment and classify these stimuli into categories and concepts, thus reducing the amount of environmental information into the "pieces" which can be used or stored very economically. For a first approach lets assume that prototypes are some kind of average representation of stimuli of one class. Indeed our brain seems to process faces this way. There are some hints that our brain solves the problem of storing faces with the help of prototypes. We seem to build facial prototypes and then simply store the deviations of a single face from these prototypes. The Attractive Prototype: Faces. Several studies have repeatedly shown that computer generated prototypical faces are more attractive than the single faces which have been used for generating them. But there are two caveats: this is only replicable for female faces and all researchers find that there are some individual faces that are more attractive than the prototypes. The Attractive Prototype: Bodies. Prototyping also does not apply only to faces. It is more complex. Devendra Singh describes a single measure, which can be linked constantly to bodily attra...
