Robust Medusa effect across facial manipulations

The way a person is visually represented can affect how we perceive their mind. One example is the Medusa effect, where people attribute less mind to individuals presented indirectly, such as in a photo of a photo (L2), compared to those shown directly in a photo (L1). The present study aimed to examine the robustness and generalizability of this effect, particularly with respect to the cultural origin of facial stimuli and facial manipulations. Across eight experiments, we tested whether this nested representation leads to lower judgments of agency, experience, and realness, even when using novel Asian and artificial facial stimuli and manipulating them to disrupt holistic and feature-based processing. Participants consistently attributed less mind to L2 representations than to L1. This effect was observed across both human and artificial faces and persisted under conditions involving inversion, mask-wearing, sunglasses-wearing, and spatial scrambling of faces. These results indicate that mind perception is influenced less by what is shown in a face than by how the person is presented structurally, including the representational level introduced by additional layers of depiction.