The cheerleader effect describes the phenomenon whereby faces are perceived as being more attractive when flanked by other faces than when they are perceived in isolation. At least four theories predict the cheerleader effect. Two visual memory processes could cause a cheerleader effect. First, visual information will sometimes be averaged in the visual memory: the averaging of faces could increase the perceived attractiveness of all the faces flanked by other faces. Second, information will often be combined into a higher-order concept. (...) This hierarchical encoding suggests that information processing causes faces to appear more attractive when flanked by highly attractive faces. Two further explanations posit that comparison processes cause the cheerleader effect. While contrast effects predict that a difference between the target face and the flanking faces causes the cheerleader effect due to comparison processes, a change in the evaluation mode, which alters the standard of comparison between joint and separate evaluation of faces, could be sufficient for producing a cheerleader effect. This leads to the prediction that even when there is no contrast between the attractiveness of the target face and the flanking faces, a cheerleader effect could occur. The results of one experiment support this prediction. The findings of this study have practical implications, such as for individuals who post selfies on social media. An individual’s face will appear more attractive in a selfie taken with people of low attractiveness than in a selfie without other people, even when all the faces have equally low levels of attractiveness. (shrink)

The visual system is known to extract summary representations of visually similar objects which bias the perception of individual objects toward the ensemble average. Although vision plays a large role in guiding action, less is known about whether ensemble representation is informative for action. Motor behavior is tuned to the veridical dimensions of objects and generally considered resistant to perceptual biases. However, when the relevant grasp dimension is not available or is unconstrained, ensemble perception may be informative to behavior by (...) providing gist information about surrounding objects. In the present study, we examined if summary representations of a surrounding ensemble display influenced grip aperture and orientation when participants reached-to-grasp a central circular target which had an explicit size but importantly no explicit orientation that the visuomotor system could selectively attend to. Maximum grip aperture and grip orientation were not biased by ensemble statistics during grasping, although participants were able to perceive and provide manual estimations of the average size and orientation of the ensemble display. Support vector machine classification of ensemble statistics achieved above-chance classification accuracy when trained on kinematic and electromyography data of the perceptual but not grasping conditions, supporting our univariate findings. These results suggest that even along unconstrained grasping dimensions, visually-guided behaviors toward real-world objects are not biased by ensemble processing. (shrink)