Exogenous attention and memory for faces following contextual behavioral immune system activation

Abstract

The behavioral immune system (BIS) is characterized by affective, cognitive and behavioral processes that work in an articulated manner to prevent the occurrence of infections. Attention and memory evolved to enhance the organism's chances of survival and have been proposed to play an important role in the BIS. The present study investigated the effects of attention and memory for neutral faces after a contextual activation of the BIS. Participants were primed, by the use of film clips, either with infectious disease concerns or non‐infectious disease concerns. They performed an exogenous attentional task involving the discrimination of target letters, with face stimuli presented as distractors, which was then followed by a surprise recognition task for the faces. The results showed that participants in the infectious disease condition were more accurate in the attentional task than participants in the control condition. No significant difference between groups was found in the response times during the attention task nor in memory performance. Overall, these results suggest that the BIS might be associated with a hypervigilant state towards cues in general and that BIS activation through this type of priming may not be sufficient to clearly activate mnemonic mechanisms.

The impact of COVID‐19 concerns on perceiving others' faces

“…The latter is true even when controlling for individual differences, such as perceived vulnerability to disease and recent illness. These results are in line with previous literature showing that, albeit with different processual mechanisms, priming concerns about infectious diseases lead to slight changes in the attentional processing of neutral faces (Magalhães et al, 2018). Yet, this effect was specific to COVID‐19, as no differences were obtained between the other disease videos and the non‐disease control.…”

“…Following the approach of previous studies (e.g., Magalhães et al, 2018; Tskhay et al, 2016), the disease threat concerns were manipulated through the presentation of educational videos. Importantly, these did not depict real images, but drawing illustrations, which allowed us to create comparable videos across the different conditions.…”