The role of attention in the effect of facial attractiveness on time perception

Abstract

Recent research has indicated that attractive faces often cause a dilation of our time perception thus affecting physical and mental health, and speculates that this could be relevant to the fact that attractive faces capture people's attention. Nevertheless, there was no direct experimental data to support this speculation. The present work was designed to illustrate how attention affects time perception of facial attractiveness. It utilized two experiments to investigate this phenomenon. In Experiment 1, perception of timing and attention bias were assessed using a temporal reproduction task and a dot-probe task. Increased attention bias was found to mediate the time dilation effect of facial attractiveness. Experiment 2 adopted dual-task paradigm, combining a temporal reproduction task and attractiveness rating task, to manipulate attention allocation. The findings suggested that allocating more attention to the task requiring timing enhanced the time dilation effect caused by the faces. Results of Experiments 1 and 2 converge to show that attention plays an essential role in the effects of facial attractiveness on time perception.

Keywords

attention / attractiveness / dot-probe task / dual-task / time perception

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