The Secrets of Faces

Abstract

This is a comment on an article by Perrett et al., on the same issue of Nature, investigating face perception. With computer graphics, Perrett and colleagues have produced exaggerated male and female faces, and asked people to rate them with respect to femininity or masculinity, and personality traits such as intelligence, emotionality and so on. The key question is: what informations do faces (and sexual signals in general) convey? One view, supported by Perrett and colleagues, is that all aspects of sexual signals convey important information about partner quality. We suggest instead that the interaction between the signal and the receiver's nervous system can result in the evolution of sexual traits not linked to partner quality.