Investigating Behaviour and Face Encoding in a Hypothetical Real-World Social Contract: Handwashing in Hazardous Health Settings

Abstract

Investigations into the evolutionary origins of human cognition has shown that individuals' memory for others is influenced by the latter's behaviour in social contracts. Such research is primarily based on hypothetical or more abstract forms of social contracts, whereas an application of this knowledge to everyday health behaviours can be of great value. To address this, the current study investigated whether participants who were asked to imagine themselves in a hypothetical hazardous health scenario showed differential response sensitivity (d′) and latency (RT) to faces of hospital staff tagged with contrasting hand hygiene before touching patients: clean hands, dirty hands, or unknown handwashing behaviour (control). The test used a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC: "old/new") face recognition paradigm. The findings showed that d′ to dirty and clean hands were similar, but higher than for controls. Moreover, d′ was not affected by the occupation of hospital staff (nurses vs. porters). The absence of memory gains towards clean or dirty hands points to the need for new strategies to remind patients to observe (and remember) the hand hygiene of others when exposed to hazardous health environments.

Asymmetries During Multiple Face Encoding: Increased Dwell Time and Number of Fixations in the Upper Visual Hemifield

“…Few studies examined face recognition with multiple faces at once and even fewer investigated tagging faces with different behaviours, a common behaviour in social gatherings and relevant information in eye witnesses' reports. The findings from earlier studies showed a range of face recognition biases in social scenarios, from biases towards cooperators (cf., Barclay, 2004) or free-riders (cf., Cosmides, Tooby, Fiddick, & Bryant, 2005), to reports of no biases towards either of them (cf., Felisberti & Farrelly, 2016). One such study revealed recognition biases towards faces tagged with a cooperative rather than neutral or cheating behaviour (Felisberti & Pavey, 2010).…”

Incongruent autobiographical trustworthiness information affects face recognition: Empirical investigation of an adaptive memory for social exchanges

“…By showing that face recognition and source memory are affected by information specific to trustworthiness rather than for autobiographical information in general, this is the first study to show that this is not a general facet of human memory, but instead can be adaptive in specifically aiding the ability to detect potential cooperators and/or cheaters in social exchanges. Further research can examine how different autobiographical information about others affects decision making, with the aims of applying this knowledge to real world scenarios, such as health behaviours (Felisberti & Farrelly, 2016) and also furthering our understanding of how our different cognitive capacities may be adaptive. Furthermore, by identifying these key influences, we will know more about how adaptive our ability is to deal with the wealth of information we gain about others in various social interactions.…”