The effects of face attractiveness on face memory depend on both age of perceiver and age of face

ABSTRACT

Face attractiveness can influence memory for previously seen faces. This effect has been shown to differ for young and older perceivers. Two parallel studies examined the moderation of both the age of the face and the age of the perceiver on the relationship between facial attractiveness and face memory. Study 1 comprised 29 young and 31 older participants; Study 2 comprised 25 young and 24 older participants. In both studies, participants completed an incidental face encoding and a surprise old/new recognition test with young and older faces that varied in face attractiveness. Face attractiveness affected memory for young but not older faces. In addition, young but not older perceivers showed a linear effect of facial attractiveness on memory for young faces, while both young and older perceivers showed a quadratic effect on memory for young faces. These findings extend previous work by demonstrating that the effect of facial attractiveness on face memory is a function of both the age of the perceiver and the age of the face. Factors that could account for such moderations of face and perceiver age on the associations between face attractiveness and face memory are discussed (e.g. age differences in social goals and face similarity/distinctiveness).

KEYWORDS:

• Face attractiveness
• face memory
• face age
• perceiver age

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank Sebastian Gluth for assistant in programming the task, Anna Rieckmann for data collection in Study 1, Michael Marsiske, Ronald Cohen, and Andreas Keil for constructive feedback regarding data analysis and manuscript writing, and Sevilay Yumusak for proofreading the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/8xfzp/?view_only=8a10708dd3674828befddf9538e477ec.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 One young rater chose 0 for 95% of the ratings (M = 0.69, SD = 3.25, Range: 0–25), indicating failure to understand or low compliance with instructions. We excluded ratings from this rater.

2 In Study 1, participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging during the face encoding and recognition phases (Ebner, Johnson, & Fischer, 2012 for neuroimaging details). In Study 2, participants’ eye movements were recorded during the encoding phase (He, Ebner, & Johnson, 2011 for details about the eye-tracking set-up). Here, we do not report results from brain and eye-tracking data but focus on the behavioral data pertaining to the relation between face recognition memory and ratings of face attractiveness.

Additional information

Funding

Study 1 was supported by the Swedish Research Council (2008-2356) and Konung Gustaf V:s och Drottning Victorias Frimurarestiftelse awarded to HF, National Institute on Aging grant (R37AG009253) to MKJ, and German Research Foundation Research Grant (DFG EB436/1-1) to NCE and was conducted at the Karolinska Institute MR-Center, Huddinge Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden. Study 2 was supported by the National Institute on Aging grant (NIH R37AG009253) to MKJ and a German Research Foundation Research Grant (DFG EB 436/1-1) to NCE and was conducted at Yale University.