Beautiful Faces Enhance Verbal Working Memory Performance: An Nirs Study

Abstract

In addition to material rewards (such as money, food, and liquid), various social signals, including facial attractiveness, are perceived as incentives. Although material and monetary rewards are known to enhance various aspects of cognitive performance, it is not clear whether and how social signals affect cognition. The present study focused on facial attractiveness and investigated its effects on working memory. In addition, we used near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to characterize the activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), an area known to be involved in the processing of reward-related cues in working memory. Our results show that compared to the non-reward condition, the cue for attractive faces enhanced working memory performance, but DLPFC activation did not differ between these two conditions. These results provide new evidence that facial attractiveness enhances verbal working memory performance and function via neural mechanisms different from those characterized for other types of rewarding cues.

Always on My Mind? Recognition of Attractive Faces May Not Depend on Attention

“…However, because the photographs are attractive, it may be useful to “remember” them, even though falsely. Considering previous research, it seems that we have to agree with those claiming that attractive stimuli have an advantage in enhancing memory recognition – such as Cross et al (1971) , Kajimura et al (2014) and others ( Marzi and Viggiano, 2010 ; Tsukiura and Cabeza, 2011 ; Zhang et al, 2011 ) – while also agreeing with those claiming that the accuracy of that recognition is lower for attractive stimuli ( Light et al, 1981 ; Sarno and Alley, 1997 ; Wiese et al, 2014 ).…”

“…However, they have brought mixed results. Whereas some researchers reported more accurate memory for attractive stimuli (e.g., Cross et al, 1971 ; Allan et al, 2012 ; Kajimura et al, 2014 ), others found the opposite ( Light et al, 1981 ; Sarno and Alley, 1997 ; Wiese et al, 2014 ), some did not obtain a difference in memory accuracy ( Brigham, 1990 ; Wickham and Morris, 2003 ; Anderson et al, 2010 ) and others obtained a mixture of both ( Deblieck and Zaidel, 2003 ). It also seems that, compared with males, females are better at remembering same-sex faces when faces of both sexes are presented ( Rehnman and Herlitz, 2007 ; Wang, 2013 ).…”

“…So why did different authors obtain different and sometimes opposite results? Some authors claim that this may be due to not controlling certain facial characteristics, namely distinctiveness and prototypicality ( Light et al, 1981 ; Bruce et al, 1994 ; Marzi and Viggiano, 2010 ; Wiese et al, 2014 ), motivation (e.g., Maner et al, 2012 ; Skelly and Decety, 2012 ; Kajimura et al, 2014 ), and familiarity (e.g., Shepherd et al, 1991 ; Monin, 2003 ; Corneille et al, 2005 ; Edmonds et al, 2012 ; Estudillo, 2012 ). Monin (2003) asked university students to rate 80 pictures on various dimensions, including attractiveness, familiarity, unfamiliarity and distinctiveness, and found that people rated the most attractive were also considered as the most likely of having been seen on campus, even after controlling for distinctiveness and despite all photographs being of people unknown to the participants.…”

Lie Detection Using fNIRS Monitoring of Inhibition-Related Brain Regions Discriminates Infrequent but not Frequent Liars

“…Forty-two channels of an fNIRS system (FOIRE-3000, Shimadzu Corporation, Kyoto, Japan) were used in the present study (Kajimura et al, 2014 ). This system operates at three wavelengths (780 nm, 805 nm and 830 nm; Zhu et al, 2014 ).…”