Fig 1.
Illustrations of stimuli based on photographic data used for the four conditions.
From the top left, a high baby schema object is touched by a model, a high baby schema object is not touched by a model, a low baby schema object is touched by a model, and a low baby schema object is not touched by a model. Four different human models appeared in the experiment. Four different human models appeared in the experiment. The four illustrations presented here were created by Gemini 3 Pro Image (Google LLC) using photographs taken by one of the authors [Akane Ohashi] as visual reference prompts. The shapes of the objects were altered by the authors from the originals. According to Google’s policy on the Use of Generated Content (https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms#use-generated), this figure is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
Fig 2.
Schematic illustration of the rating targets.
The participants were asked to rate (1) their impression of the object, (2) their impression of the model, and (3) their guess about the model’s impression of the object. They rated each of the targets from the perspectives of cuteness/kawaii, infantility/osanai, and beauty/utsukushii.
Table 1.
Summary of the Object’s Baby Schema × Model’s Posture ANOVAs on cuteness/kawaii ratings.
Fig 3.
Mean cuteness/kawaii ratings of the three rating targets.
Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001.
Table 2.
Summary of the Country × Object’s Baby Schema × Model’s Posture ANOVAs on the cuteness/kawaii ratings in the omnibus analysis.