I'm interested in Evolutionary Psychology and the male perception of female beauty. One of the ideas I'm trying to investigate is the correlation between female fertility and her attractiveness. A figure I heard several times is that at around age 25 females are the most fertile and thus most attractive.

I'm trying to verify this experimentally. It seems to me like a simple experiment would be to present an observer with a lineup of photos of the same woman at different ages. Everyone has photos at different ages, but I'm looking for the one where the posture and facial expressions are controlled, as to reduce variation due to factors other than age.

My question is - Are there posture controlled lineups of the photos of age progression from 15 to 50 that I can use for such experiment?

This image is from a video of a woman aging, but it has no age indication. I'm looking for something with shorter age gaps (15-16-17-18-...50). It seems one of the relevant search terms is "age progression" are there others? enter image description here

  • $\begingroup$ Interesting experiment. Are you looking for photos of people digitally aged or naturally aged? Do you think that would make a difference? $\endgroup$ – Chris Rogers Apr 7 '18 at 12:02
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    $\begingroup$ Ideally these women would be naturally aged, as part of the attractiveness effect appears to be attributed to the effects of hormone levels, primarily estrogen. Part of the experiment is understanding if the male eye is capable of distinguishing these very subtle differences (94% peak estrogen vs 99% peak estrogen). Digital photo aging does not have hormonal effects. $\endgroup$ – Alex Stone Apr 8 '18 at 4:01
  • $\begingroup$ I'm not aware of a dataset like that, but it could certainly be done by digital manipulation of photos (there is really good software for that nowadays that makes incredibly realistic-looking stimuli). I don't know if you meant that you wanted actual photos though? $\endgroup$ – lindlesby Apr 11 '18 at 7:59
  • $\begingroup$ I don't feel like digital manipulation would create a difference as subtle as 22 years old vs 23 vs 24 years old. $\endgroup$ – Alex Stone Apr 13 '18 at 13:29
  • $\begingroup$ It would seem highly-valuable to have a canoncial set of images of known ages and AI algorithms which can ascribe age to arbitrary face images, of both genders, many nationalities, attractivenesses and health/neotony epigenetics. $\endgroup$ – dhchdhd Apr 22 '18 at 4:57

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