Parasocial relationships are one-sided relationships that people hold with media figures. Although it has been previously demonstrated that people often feel strong friendships with people that they have never met, parasocial romantic attachments have not been well-studied. In the current study, we examined reasons why people form parasocial romances from a social exchange perspective by surveying participants on perceived costs and benefits of both real-life and parasocial romantic relationships (PSROMs), and on the strength of their PSROMs. We found that participants who reported stronger PSROMs also reported greater perceived benefits (relative to costs) of PSROMs, and that these benefits are surprisingly similar to those received from real-life relationships (RLRs). The results suggest that parasocial relationships are formed for similar reasons as real-life relationships, but that there are some unique costs associated with PSROMs. This research helps to explain why people form romantic attachments with media characters.

This study examined time‐of‐day associative learning to either spatial or feature information in homing pigeons in an open‐field, laboratory setting. Homing pigeons are well known for their navigational abilities and generally have been shown to rely more heavily on spatial than nonspatial cues in recognizing a goal. However, during goal localization, homing pigeons also successfully use nonspatial, feature information. Homing pigeons were divided into two groups and were trained to locate two time‐of‐day dependent, food reward sites using either discriminative spatial or feature information. Because of the importance of the hippocampus in controlling avian memory, we hypothesized that homing pigeons trained with spatial cues would be superior in learning the time‐of‐day discrimination compared to the pigeons trained with feature cues. Indeed, homing pigeons that were trained with spatial information outperformed the pigeons trained with feature information in learning the time‐of‐day discrimination task.

David Sherry has been a pioneer in investigating the avian hippocampal formation (HF) and spatial memory. Following on his work and observations that HF is sensitive to the occurrence of reward (food), we were interested in carrying out an exploratory study to investigate possible HF involvement in the representation goal value and risk. Control sham-lesioned and hippocampal-lesioned pigeons were trained in an open field to locate one food bowl containing a constant two food pellets on all trials, and two variable bowls with one containing five pellets on 75% (High Variable) and another on 25% (Low Variable) of their respective trials (High-Variable and Low-Variable bowls were never presented together). One pairing of pigeons learned bowl locations (space); another bowl colors (feature). Trained to color, hippocampal-lesioned pigeons performed as rational agents in their bowl choices and were indistinguishable from the control pigeons, a result consistent with HF regarded as unimportant for non-spatial memory. By contrast, when trained to location, hippocampal-lesioned pigeons differed from the control pigeons. They made more first-choice errors to bowls that never contained food, consistent with a role of HF in spatial memory. Intriguingly, the hippocampal-lesioned pigeons also made fewer first choices to both variable bowls, suggesting that hippocampal lesions resulted in the pigeons becoming more risk averse. Acknowledging that the results are preliminary and further research is needed, the data nonetheless support the general hypothesis that HF-dependent memory representations of space capture properties of reward value and risk, properties that contribute to decision making when confronted with a choice.

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