A modulatory effect of male voice pitch on long-term memory in women: evidence of adaptation for mate choice?

Abstract

From a functionalist perspective, human memory should be attuned to information of adaptive value for one's survival and reproductive fitness. While evidence of sensitivity to survival-related information is growing, specific links between memory and information that could impact upon reproductive fitness have remained elusive. Here, in two experiments, we showed that memory in women is sensitive to male voice pitch, a sexually dimorphic cue important for mate choice because it not only serves as an indicator of genetic quality, but may also signal behavioural traits undesirable in a long-term partner. In Experiment 1, we report that women's visual object memory is significantly enhanced when an object's name is spoken during encoding in a masculinised (i.e., lower-pitch) versus feminised (i.e., higher-pitch) male voice, but that no analogous effect occurs when women listen to other women's voices. Experiment 2 replicated this pattern of results, additionally showing that lowering and raising male voice pitch enhanced and impaired women's memory, respectively, relative to a baseline (i.e., unmanipulated) voice condition. The modulatory effect of sexual dimorphism cues in the male voice may reveal a mate-choice adaptation within women's memory, sculpted by evolution in response to the dilemma posed by the double-edged qualities of male masculinity.

Socio-sexuality and episodic memory function in women: further evidence of an adaptive “mating mode”

“…Also as was predicted, the analogous bias was absent in male participants, even though they significantly preferred feminized versus masculinized women's faces. Overall, these findings revealed a novel pattern of sex differences in memory function, supporting our hypothesis that information linked to desirable men is valuable for women's mate choice (see also Smith et al, 2012) and that mere preference for a facial feature is not sufficient to drive the memory bias. It is also worth noting that these findings are somewhat counterintuitive, on the assumption that attractive faces of the opposite sex might be attention grabbing, for which there is behavioral evidence (e.g., Anderson et al, 2010).…”

“…In two recent papers (Allan, Jones, DeBruine, & Smith, 2012;Smith, Jones, Feinberg, & Allan, 2012), however, we used an ecological model of mate choice (Bateson & Healy, 2005) to develop novel hypotheses about memory function in relation to a woman's reproductive fitness. We chose this approach because ecologists interested in the cognition that underlies mate choice have already laid some of the groundwork for a functionalist perspective by identifying circumstances where memory could play a crucial role (Bateson & Healy, 2005).…”

“…On the basis of this prior work, we suggested (Allan et al, 2012a; see also Smith et al, 2012) that women's evaluation of men in terms of their sexually dimorphic cues provides an ideal test of Bateson and Healy's (2005) ideas about the role of memory in mate choice. To reiterate, Bateson and Healy argued that memory can provide information that aids evaluation of men as potential partners, in situations where their physical characteristics have both positive and negative connotations.…”

Adaptive Memory: Remembering Potential Mates

“…One potentially important difference between these approaches is that, whereas in the former the assessment of random words or objects provided no explicit information relevant to solving the adaptive problem of selecting a mate, in the latter, there is always some element of the encoding task that affords information about the mating value of the candidate, such as sexually dimorphic characteristics (Smith, Jones, Feinberg, & Allan, 2011). Still, these latter studies usually probed memory only for arbitrary stimuli previously associated with reproduction-relevant characteristics and have not contrasted mating against nonmating related conditions.…”

“…For example, male voices with lower pitches are indicative of reproductive success (e.g., Apicella, Feinberg, & Marlowe, 2007). Smith, Jones, Feinberg, and Allan (2011) had females observe objects presented on the screen while the objects' names were simultaneously presented aloud via headphones. The key manipulation was the nature of the voices which varied in sex (male or female voices) and in pitch (lowered or raised to become more or less masculinized, respectively).…”