When memory meets beauty: Insights from event-related potentials.
Facial attractiveness plays a key role in human social and affective behavior. To study the time course of the neural processing of attractiveness and its influence on recognition memory we investigated the event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited in an old/new recognition task in response to faces with a neutral expression that, at encoding, were rated for their attractiveness. Highly attractive faces elicited a specific early positive-going component on frontal sites; in addition, with respect to less attractive faces, they elicited larger later components related to structural encoding and recognition memory. All in all, our results show that facial attractiveness, independently from facial expression, modulates face processing throughout all stages from encoding to retrieval.
Marzi
T
T
Department of Psychology, University of Florence, Via di San Salvi 26, 50100 Firenze, Italy.
Viggiano
M P
MP
D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001504:Beauty; D001931:Brain Mapping; D004569:Electroencephalography / Q000379:methods; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult