Silva, A, Macedo, AF, Albuquerque, PB and Arantes, J (2016) Always on My Mind? Recognition of Attractive Faces May Not Depend on Attention. Frontiers in Psychology, 7. ISSN 1664-1078

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Abstract

Little research has examined what happens to attention and memory as a whole when humans see someone attractive. Hence, we investigated whether attractive stimuli gather more attention and are better remembered than unattractive stimuli. Participants took part in an attention task – in which matrices containing attractive and unattractive male naturalistic photographs were presented to 54 females, and measures of eye-gaze location and fixation duration using an eye-tracker were taken – followed by a recognition task. Eye-gaze was higher for the attractive stimuli compared to unattractive stimuli. Also, attractive photographs produced more hits and false recognitions than unattractive photographs which may indicate that regardless of attention allocation, attractive photographs produce more correct but also more false recognitions. We present an evolutionary explanation for this, as attending to more attractive faces but not always remembering them accurately and differentially compared with unseen attractive faces, may help females secure mates with higher reproductive value.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This Document is Protected by copyright and was first published by Frontiers. All rights reserved. it is reproduced with permission.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	1701 Psychology
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Divisions:	Natural Sciences & Psychology (closed 31 Aug 19)
Publisher:	Frontiers Media
Date Deposited:	03 May 2017 09:35
Last Modified:	04 Sep 2021 11:39
DOI or ID number:	10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00053
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/6340

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