Meaningful faces: Self-relevance of semantic context in an initial social encounter improves later face recognition
- PDF / 916,957 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 44 Downloads / 181 Views
BRIEF REPORT
Meaningful faces: Self-relevance of semantic context in an initial social encounter improves later face recognition Sarah D. McCrackin 1 & Christopher M. Lee 1 & Roxane J. Itier 1 & Myra A. Fernandes 1 Accepted: 30 August 2020 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Self-relevant stimuli (i.e. meaningful/important to the observer and related to the self) are typically remembered better than otherrelevant stimuli. However, whether a self-relevance memory benefit could be conferred to a novel neutral face, remains to be seen. Recent studies have shown that emotional responses to neutral faces can be altered by using a preceding sentence as context that varies in terms of self-relevance (self/other-relevant) and valence (positive/negative; e.g. "S/he thinks your comment is dumb/smart"). We adapted this paradigm to investigate whether the context conferred by the preceding sentence also impacts memorability of the subsequently presented face. Participants saw faces primed with contextual sentences and rated how aroused, and how positive or negative, the faces made them feel. Later incidental recognition accuracy for the faces was greater when these had been preceded by self-relevant compared to other-relevant sentences. Faces preceded by self-relevant contexts were also rated as more arousing. There was no impact of sentence valence on arousal ratings or on recognition memory for faces. Sentence self-relevance and valence interacted to affect participants’ ratings of how positive or negative the faces made them feel during encoding, but did not interact to impact later recognition. Our results indicate that initial social encounters can have a lasting effect on one’s memory of another person, producing an enhanced memory trace of that individual. We propose that the effect is driven by an arousal-based mechanism, elicited by faces perceived to be self-relevant. Keywords Face recognition . Self-relevance . Valence . Context . Face memory . Arousal
Introduction Recognition of faces is one of our most important social abilities (Hou & Liu, 2019) and recognition impairments can have a large impact on forming and maintaining social relationships (e.g. Yardley et al., 2008; Dalrymple et al., 2014; Fine, 2012). There are many physical factors during an initial interaction that can later impact recognition memory for faces, including lighting, viewpoint, and physical features (see Johnston & Edmonds, 2009; Bruce and Young, 1986 for reviews). However, we also know that accompanying a target with another that is semantically meaningful enhances memorability of the target (Skinner & Fernandes, 2010), and preliminary evidence suggests that pairing a face with conceptual detail (e.g. a name), can * Sarah D. McCrackin [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, 200 University Ave W, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada
provide a memorial benefit to the face (Schwartz & Yovel, 2016). We are still learning about what types of semantic information can confer memory benefits to faces, and ho
Data Loading...
