Certain EP theories have suggested that humans feel "attracted" to bodily features based on symmetry, because symmetry in a body is related to genetic health. Thus attraction to symmetry would result in more/healthy offspring and so get reinforced.
While they were basing their research off of findings that people tend to find "average" more attractive than "unique", the discovery of an underpinning principle is important here. From the authors, on attraction...
... analyzed previous studies and conducted new research to find that attractiveness could be linked to ease of mental processing....
But what comes first - the perception that the image is easy to process or the ability to process the image for easy perception?
It's not like the issue of beauty is one of simplicity versus complexity, but involves several factors.
Thus it appears that brain processes might create a general selective function which does not rely on specific evolutionary benefits.
But there are very real benefits to finding an average individual to be attractive that have nothing to do with psychology
- they are most likely to have genes compatible for producing viable offspring, rather than be some borderline variety near speciation, and
- they are most likely to be members of your species rather than some similar but different species (so many species are so similar, from monkeys to greenish warbler ring species, etc) where it would be a waste of time to attempt mating.
These two tendencies would be enough for natural selection to favor organisms finding average individuals to be attractive.
This is also a mechanism that can provide a cause for stasis in populations not under significant selection pressure -- sexual selection in every generation towards an average individual would tend to diminish the ability of extreme variations to propagate. This also maintains fitness of the species for the environment during times of little selection pressure.
The images could be easy to process because they are compared against an averaged template eh? The more similar {A} is to {ideal beauty} the easier it is to process.
Symmetry is just an averaging of both sides -- the more symmetrical the organism the more averaged it is, and the easier it is for the image to be processed.
Ease of processing does not explain the different markings on very similar species, from rather insignificant white lines in some throats to marks that are only displayed during {mating\courtship} displays.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out in further studies.
Just some thoughts.
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