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Temporal Course of Neural Processing during Skin Color Perception: An Event-related Potential Study

Published: 06 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Recently, increasing number of behavioral studies have shown that subjective evaluation of health and attractiveness is modulated by facial skin color and pigment distribution. These studies, however, do not go further than describing the behavioral phenomena, and little is known about the neural mechanism underlying subjective evaluation of facial skin color. The present study investigated the temporal course of neural activation related to subjective evaluation of skin color of female faces. To achieve this goal, we analyzed the event-related potentials recorded while participants were evaluating attractiveness and perceived health of synthesized female faces with their skin color being systematically modulated. Principal component analysis revealed that perceived health modulated ERP at multiple time windows, while no prominent effect of perceived attractiveness was observed. This finding indicates the possibility that the visual system treats the facial skin color primarily as a clue of con-specific's health states. The implementation of such machinery is supposedly beneficial in mate-selection by increasing the odds of successful reproduction.

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  • (2019)[Invited papers] A Survey on Multimedia Artworks Analysis and Attractiveness Computing in MultimediaITE Transactions on Media Technology and Applications10.3169/mta.7.607:2(60-67)Online publication date: 2019

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  1. Temporal Course of Neural Processing during Skin Color Perception: An Event-related Potential Study

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    MMArt&ACM'18: Proceedings of the 2018 International Joint Workshop on Multimedia Artworks Analysis and Attractiveness Computing in Multimedia
    June 2018
    41 pages
    ISBN:9781450357982
    DOI:10.1145/3209693
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 06 June 2018

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    Author Tags

    1. face perception
    2. neural response
    3. skin color

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    • JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas "SHITSUKAN"

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    ICMR '18
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    • (2019)[Invited papers] A Survey on Multimedia Artworks Analysis and Attractiveness Computing in MultimediaITE Transactions on Media Technology and Applications10.3169/mta.7.607:2(60-67)Online publication date: 2019

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