ArticleRoyal Society open science2016
Beauty is in the efficient coding of the beholder.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Comparing Activation Typicality and Sparsity in a Deep CNN to Predict Facial Beauty.Computational brain & behavior · 2025Article
- The edge orientation entropy of natural scenes is associated with infant visual preferences and adult aesthetic judgements.PloS one · 2025Article
- Is the human face a biomarker of health? - A scoping review.PloS one · 2025Article
- The perceived beauty of art is not strongly calibrated to the statistical regularities of real-world scenes.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Sparsity in an artificial neural network predicts beauty: Towards a model of processing-based aesthetics.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Darwin, sexual selection, and the brain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- From likely to likable: The role of statistical typicality in human social assessment of faces.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Observational
- Sexual signaling pattern correlates with habitat pattern in visually ornamented fishes.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Global Image Properties Predict Ratings of Affective Pictures.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Evolution of sexual cooperation from sexual conflict.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Processing bias: extending sensory drive to include efficacy and efficiency in information processing.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Review
- Endless forms of sexual selection.PeerJ · 2019Article
- Global Sensory Qualities and Aesthetic Experience in Music.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2017Article
- Statistical Image Properties in Large Subsets of Traditional Art,Frontiers in neuroscience · 2017Article
- Computational and Experimental Approaches to Visual Aesthetics.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2017Review
- The Role of Perceived Health in Preferences for Average Face Shapes.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
- Aesthetic Perception of Line Patterns: Effect of Edge-Orientation Entropy and Curvilinear Shape.i-PerceptionArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sexual ornaments are often assumed to be indicators of mate quality. Yet it remains poorly known how certain ornaments are chosen before any coevolutionary race makes them indicative. Perceptual biases have been proposed to play this role, but known biases are mostly restricted to a specific taxon, which precludes evaluating their general importance in sexual selection. Here we identify a potentially universal perceptual bias in mate choice. We used an algorithm that models the sparseness of the activity of simple cells in the primary visual cortex (or V1) of humans when coding images of female faces. Sparseness was found positively correlated with attractiveness as rated by men and explained up to 17% of variance in attractiveness. Because V1 is adapted to process signals from natural scenes, in general, not faces specifically, our results indicate that attractiveness for female faces is influenced by a visual bias. Sparseness and more generally efficient neural coding are ubiquitous, occurring in various animals and sensory modalities, suggesting that the influence of efficient coding on mate choice can be widespread in animals.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.