Temporal Course of Neural Processing during Skin Color Perception

Recently, increasing number of behavioral studies have shown that subjective evaluation of health and attractiveness is modulated by facial skin color and pigment distribution. These studies, however, do not go further than describing the behavioral phenomena, and little is known about the neural mechanism underlying subjective evaluation of facial skin color. The present study investigated the temporal course of neural activation related to subjective evaluation of skin color of female faces. To achieve this goal, we analyzed the event-related potentials recorded while participants were evaluating attractiveness and perceived health of synthesized female faces with their skin color being systematically modulated. Principal component analysis revealed that perceived health modulated ERP at multiple time windows, while no prominent effect of perceived attractiveness was observed. This finding indicates the possibility that the visual system treats the facial skin color primarily as a clue of opposite-sex individual's health states. The implementation of such machinery is supposedly beneficial in mate-selection by increasing the odds of successful reproduction.