>If you want to test EEG ratings of attractiveness, you should just compare manual ratings to EEG ratings without prompting them to focus on attractive faces.

>If you want to test EEG ratings of attractiveness, you should just compare manual ratings to EEG ratings without prompting them to focus on attractive faces. Yeah, as you say, it'd be very interesting if it could first associate self-reports of attractiveness with EEG activity, and then know roughly how attractive you consider someone based solely on blind EEG data. Then reverse the process by generating lots of faces and picking the one that someone seems to be most attracted to purely based on their EEG. (This is what I initially thought the study would be doing.) I suspect there would be major challenges with this, though. Besides EEG data possibly being too coarse, it's possible that what happens in the brain when you see someone you find attractive is very complicated and multifaceted. I think "attractiveness" may not be a single metric along a gradient even for a single individual's brain, let alone among a population. So even training on each person individually might not be that fruitful. For example, you may find two different people attractive due to a mix of reasons - some shared reasons, and some differing reasons. I'd guess the brain activity might differ in some ways in those cases. Maybe also even while looking at different photos of the same person, or even the same photo at different times. I know people tend to go through hormone cycles throughout the day; it's possible activity (as well as subjective attractiveness perception at a given time) may differ depending on what phase of a cycle you're in, or food, coffee, or alcohol you've had recently, etc. But who knows, maybe there often is some consistent pattern of activity which would serve as a decent proxy for overall attractiveness perception, if it could just be sifted out of the noise. This is probably just extremely difficult to do with current technology and neuroscience understanding, even if it may be feasible in theory. I'm sure we'll see more things like that in the coming decades.