Face-body integration in pairwise similarity ratings

Motivated by face–body integration theory in whole-person perception (Hu, Baragchizadeh, & O’Toole, 2020), this project tests how face and body information combine to support whole-person similarity judgments. Participants provide pairwise similarity ratings for the same-gender, different-identity pairs of Chinese models. Experiment 1 will measure similarity using isolated cues (face-only, body-only, clothes-only) and whole-person images to estimate the unique contributions of each cue to whole-person similarity. Experiment 2 will then evaluate whether whole-person similarity generalizes across independent samples better than similarity computed from face–body average (“fusion”) or from configuration-disrupted whole-person images (scrambled, misaligned). Finally, Experiment 3 will test whole-person context effects by asking participants to rate face or body similarity while viewing intact whole persons, and will compare these in-context part ratings to the corresponding isolated part ratings.