When we see a face, we rapidly form an impression of its attractiveness. Here, we investigated how rapidly representations of facial attractiveness emerge in the human brain. In an EEG experiment, participants viewed 100 face photographs and rated them for their attractiveness. Using time-resolved representational similarity analysis on the EEG data, we reveal representations of facial attractiveness after 150-200ms of cortical processing. Interestingly, we show that these representations are related to individual participants' personal attractiveness judgments, suggesting that already early perceptual representations of facial attractiveness convey idiosyncratic attractiveness preferences. Further, we show that these early representations are genuinely related to attractiveness, as they are neither explained by other high-level face attributes, such as face sex or age, nor by features extracted by an artificial deep neural network model of face processing. Together, our results demonstrate early, individually specific, and genuine representations of facial attractiveness, which may underlie fast attractiveness judgments. IntroductionWhen we see a face, we almost immediately can tell whether we find it attractive or not [1]. Beyond such first impressions, facial attractiveness affects people's everyday lives in fundamental ways: for instance, an attractive face grants advantages in various aspects, such as increased success in dating [2,3], receiving help more often [4,5], and being more successful on the job market [6,7].Given these varied effects of facial attractiveness, a large body of research has focused on understanding the factors that make a face attractive. One line of research has tried to establish objective physical markers of facial attractiveness [8,9], revealing that faces are more attractive when they are more similar to the average [10,11], more symmetric [11][12][13], or have favourable sexual characteristics [14]. This research has led into advances in computer vision, providing algorithms that can predict how attractive humans will find a particular face [15,16]. However, there is considerable agreement that there is also a subjective component to facial attractiveness, with responses varying substantially between observers [17][18][19]. Indeed, our impression of facial attractiveness may depend on both: an objectively attractive physical composition of visual features and an idiosyncratic appreciation of these features.How does the brain achieve the transition from physical stimulus properties into an individual representation of facial attractiveness? To answer this question, previous studies have used event-related potentials (ERPs) obtained from EEG recordings to investigate when brain responses to more or less attractive faces differ.Although in many such studies facial attractiveness influences multiple ERP components, a key question is when facial attractiveness is first represented in EEG signals. The answers to this question are quite mixed. Some studies highlight relatively early ER...

When we see a face, we rapidly form an impression of its attractiveness. Here, we investigated how rapidly representations of facial attractiveness emerge in the human brain. In an EEG experiment, participants viewed 100 face photographs and rated them for their attractiveness. Using time-resolved representational similarity analysis on the EEG data, we reveal representations of facial attractiveness after 150–200 ms of cortical processing. Interestingly, we show that these representations are related to individual participants’ personal attractiveness judgments, suggesting that already early perceptual representations of facial attractiveness convey idiosyncratic attractiveness preferences. Further, we show that these early representations are genuinely related to attractiveness, as they are neither explained by other high-level face attributes, such as face sex or age, nor by features extracted by an artificial deep neural network model of face processing. Together, our results demonstrate early, individually specific, and genuine representations of facial attractiveness, which may underlie fast attractiveness judgments.