Lovelab preview: interview with Prof. Fiona Newell

Fiona Newell is an Associate Professor in TCD's Institute of Neuroscience and School of Psychology with a research focus on human perceptual processes.  She is also head of the Multisensory Cognition Group. 

I sat down with her to ask a few questions about her involvement in Lovelab, and what we can expect when the exhibition opens with a special member's preview on February 10th.

Thanks for taking the time to chat today Professor Newell.  Can you start off by telling me, what Is Lovelab?

Lovelab is all about putting desire and attractiveness to the test of scientific scrutiny.  But in the past, this issue was never considered a scientific subject.  So love, desire, and attractiveness were never considered even amenable to scientific scrutiny-- they were always considered to be traits that were personal and subjective and they were topics for artists and poets and musicians; scientists never really had anything to say in particular about it. However, that ignores the fundamental human condition, which is how we're all here-- on the basis of desire and attractiveness.  If one of your parents didn't find the other attractive, you wouldn't be here today, so that automatically means it should be open to scientific principles and investigation.  Lovelab is taking a snapshot of issues to do with desire and attractiveness and running experiments to see what's behind it all.

 If all these fuzzy feelings have been the realm of poets and painters for so long, why is science getting involved now?

Well, it's not completely new.  But relative to the history of science, it's certainly new.  One reason it's becoming more important-- especially from my perspective as a neuroscientist-- is that we understand the brain more nowadays.  In particular we understand the social brain a lot more than we used to.   Desire and attractiveness have a strong social element; we are social animals. 

The second main timely influence is the role of technology.  Being able to apply computer graphics, for example, can enable us to find what it is that makes one face attractive or desirable.  And it's especially timely because there's a merging going on between different scientific disciplines.   Take attractiveness-- it's supposed to be associated with evolution, and there's one group of theorists that says the reason why we find certain faces attractive is because we're looking for a mate that connotes good genetic health.  Well, that brings in geneticists, and the reason we want to mate with someone with good genetic health is that we want offspring that are protected from illness and sickness and that brings immunologist on board, so you see it's a confluence of many different disciplines.  And that's why this focus on desire has happened more or less within the past 20 or 30 years.  I's a bit of a zeitgeist. 

Is it like Nanoscience then-- not a distinct scientific field, but a mixing of many sciences with numerous potential applications?

When you think about it-- how many social decisions get made on the basis of somebody being attractive or not?  Or desirable?  Think about the commercial aspect of that on, say, the beauty industry-- it's one of the few industries that has gone right through this recession without being touched.  People still want to look better, and be desirable, and people are willing to pay money for it.  There are a lot of sciences, companies, and industries related to this one single thing, desire.

So what's your experiment about?

I'm in the institute of neuroscience in school of psychology, so my interest is trying to find out how the brain deals with sensory info from the eyes and ears, and so on, and how does that info get shared across the senses so that we can perceive a coherent world.  Basically, how does our brain make the sounds we hear match the things we see? 

That's my general research area, but a sideline to that is pure perceptual processes, and also and also affective processes.  So-- how do we make evaluative judgments of things that we see, hear, or feel? Even in very very brief exposure to a face or a voice, we feel we can infer a lot of attributes, just from a very brief exposure.  So in one part of Lovelab we want to find out what is it about certain faces that people find attractive.  We have a place where people rate faces for how attractive they are, and in one experiment we're interested in the role of aging in attractiveness. 

The evolutionary theory is that our whole ability to judge beauty stems from this need to select a healthy mate.  From that, one scientific predication is that once you have selected your mate, you wouldn't find anybody else as attractive anymore.  Why would you though?  You've channeled all your energies into one person, and you've got your offspring.  So we might predict that there's an aging factor to judging attractiveness.  In another experiment we want to see if we can appeal to people across age groups, from 18 to 80, and find whether there are differences in what you find attractive depending on your age, or on what basis you judge attractiveness depending on the age of the face.

So what can visitors to Lovelab expect to see and do?

In that section, when people come to Lovelab, they'll see a series of faces and rate which ones they find attractive.  In another experiment we're actually going to capture everybody's face as they come into the lab (if they agree of course) and then we're going to create average faces for each age group.  Then we'll see if those average faces are rated by independent judges as being more attractive.  And despite what the media and beauty industry tell us, we're seeing that there's a universal preference for faces that are not distinct.  It's a robust effect that people prefer faces that are more typical than distinct. 

We're also capturing people's voices-- and the idea is to see if this 'averages effect' generalizes to other sensory modalities.  Do the same rules of attraction apply to the visual system and the auditory system?  Do we prefer average voices over a voice that might be considered distinct?  We want to look at that.  I mean, we know from the animal kingdom that symmetry is more attractive, but it's not the whole story.  All our experiments are about what we pick up on in a very brief exposure. 

It sounds a bit like a big lab where the visitor gets to join in.

Oh yeah, we've loads of experiments running, and it should be fun-- but we are going to get real data.  And the data is going to be useful to so many people.  We're even looking at how the sound of a voice makes you feel more or less attracted to a person. 

You're looking to see if the late night DJ's really are more attractive?

Well, we've run a pilot study, and it looks like vision dominates, but it will be useful to scientists because if we find that the sound of your voice can enhance a face that otherwise wouldn't be attractive, that will be significant.

This all sounds a bit skin deep.

It's all a bit of fun on the one hand, which is good because it gets more people to engage with science, but there is a very serious aspect, and that's the way in which our cognition can be manipulated by the media, for example.  As far as I'm concerned, there are two ways in which we think: the instantaneous reactions we get from things around us, and the more long-term, considered thought processes.  But the thing is, these instantaneous perceptions can affect out long-term behavior.  For example, there was a study published in Science magazine recently showing that US Senate and House elections were based on facial appearances.  That's quite a profound effect.  So on the one hand you could say this is very superficial. On the other hand it has profound consequences for decisions that are made by society and individuals.

The other thing is that there is a consensus that attractive people do better, get more cooperation, are more liked, and are less likely than their peers to be blamed for misdemeanors.  So on the surface there's a fun element which is great-- but behind that are very real scientific questions about what drives us to make decisions in the real world, and that's what we're trying to find out.