Attractiveness-related recognition bias captures the memory of the beholder.

Abstract

Earlier electroencephalographic studies have compared attractive and unattractive faces and between faces with other objects, such as flowers, without revealing if a recognition memory bias toward faces and flowers exists or whether humans exhibit enhanced specific components toward all attractive objects or only toward attractive faces. For objects with similar degrees of attractiveness, we sought to determine if the N170, P1, and N250 reflect upon theattractivenessof faces and flowers and demonstrated by comparing event-related potentials of humans' different perceptual mechanisms recognizinghigh attractivefaces andhigh attractiveflowers. Therepeated high attractivefaces tended to elicit a larger N170. Simultaneously, theP1was preferentially associated with therepeated high attractiveflowers,but both indicated that the repetitive enhancement effect only occurred onrepeated attractivefaces.Thus,differences existed in the perceptual mechanisms for processingrepeated high attractivefaces andrepeated high attractiveflowers.However, there was no significant difference in N250 between repeated faces andrepeatedflowers or betweenhigh attractivefaces andhigh attractiveflowers. Consequently,high attractive facesandhigh attractiveflowers capture the beholder'smemorybias in different processing stages. The N170 and P1 components are affected by attractiveness, thereby demonstrating the differences between human perceptual mechanisms in recognizing high attractivefaces and objects.