2026-10-15T04:38:03Z https://www.scidb.cn/oai

10.57760/sciencedb.33511 2026-07-02T16:17:28Z

2026-07-02 Averageness Is Not Enough: Dissociable Perceptual Codes for Body Attractiveness Versus Typicality doi:10.57760/sciencedb.33511 en Body attractiveness widely impacts daily life, yet how it is encoded remains unclear. Across two studies, American and Chinese participants (N = 425) judged computer-generated 3D female and male bodies for typicality and attractiveness. In Study 1, the two judgments were positively correlated but showed different computational signatures: Typicality was predicted by proximity to the population prototype, whereas attractiveness was better predicted by variation along specific body shape dimensions, such as curvature and muscularity. Consistent with this, the bodies judged most attractive were morphologically distinctdissociable from those judged most typical. A preregistered Study 2 directly tested this distinctiondissociation using morph continua ranging from caricatured super-typical to super-attractive bodies. Across both cultures, bodies closer to the attractive endpoint were rated as more attractive, whereas typicality ratings were lower, or comparable in magnitudemoving toward the attractive endpoint increased attractiveness while reducing typicality or leaving it unchanged. These findings indicate that body attractiveness is not simply a function of averageness but reflects perceptual coding principles distinctdissociable from those underlying body typicality.  body perception; typicality; attractiveness; culture; computational modeling Zhu Zihan Chen Lan Hu Ying PUBLIC https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ dataset Science Data Bank