Cognitive Processing in Attractiveness Judgment: An Electrophysiological Study

The present study examined how the initial brain response to the visual appearance of an object is related to the subjec-tive feeling of attractiveness. Twelve student volunteers viewed 240 pictures of everyday objects. They made a forced-choice attractiveness judgment (attractive or unattractive) on half of the pictures and a forced-choice complexity judgment (complex or simple) on the other half of the pictures. Event-related potentials (ERPs) time-locked to the pic-ture onset were averaged separately according to each viewer’s judgments. The objects judged as attractive elicited a smaller early negative potential (N2, peaking around 220 ms after stimulus onset) and a larger late positive potential (LPP, occurring after 400 ms) compared with the objects judged as unattractive. In the complexity judgment, the N2 was larger for the objects judged as complex than for the objects judged as simple, but the LPP did not differ between the categories. These findings suggest that visual information processing of attractive objects differs from that of unat-tractive objects at an early stage and that attractive objects enhance the cortical process reflected in the LPP, which has been previously reported to be associated with emotional valence