IMR Press / JIN / Volume 19 / Issue 4 / DOI: 10.31083/j.jin.2020.04.166
Open Access Original Research
Attractiveness-related recognition bias captures the memory of the beholder
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1 School of Educational Science, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, P. R. China
2 Department of Orthodontics, Shanghai Xuhui District Dental Disease Prevention and Control Institute, Shanghai, 200032, P. R. China
3 Department of Oral and Cranio-maxillofacial Surgery, Ninth People’s Hospital, Shanghai JiaoTong University School of Medicine, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Stomatology & Shanghai Research Institute of Stomatology, National Clinical Research Center of Stomatology, Shanghai, 200011, P. R. China
4 City College, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430081, P. R. China
5 Center for Brain, Mind and Education, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing, 312099, P. R. China
6 School of Teacher Education, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing, 312099, P. R. China
*Correspondence: zhangyan1981@hust.edu.cn (Yan Zhang); xieyufei9@163.com (Yu-Fei Xie); wujinyang7029@foxmail.com (Jin-Yang Wu)
These authors contributed equally.
J. Integr. Neurosci. 2020, 19(4), 629–639; https://doi.org/10.31083/j.jin.2020.04.166
Submitted: 27 May 2020 | Revised: 11 October 2020 | Accepted: 13 October 2020 | Published: 30 December 2020
Copyright: © 2020 Zhang et al. Published by IMR Press.
This is an open access article under the CC BY 4.0 license ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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 the attractiveness of faces and flowers and demonstrated by comparing event-related potentials of humans’ different perceptual mechanisms recognizing high attractive faces and high attractive flowers. The repeated high attractive faces tended to elicit a larger N170. Simultaneously, the P1 was preferentially associated with the repeated high attractive flowers, but both indicated that the repetitive enhancement effect only occurred on repeated attractive faces. Thus, differences existed in the perceptual mechanisms for processing repeated high attractive faces and repeated high attractive flowers. However, there was no significant difference in N250 between repeated faces and repeated flowers or between high attractive faces and high attractive flowers. Consequently, high attractive faces and high attractive flowers capture the beholder’s memory bias in different processing stages. The N170 and P1 components are affected by attractiveness, thereby demonstrating the differences between human perceptual mechanisms in recognizing high attractive faces and objects.

Keywords
Event-related potentials
attractive faces
attractive flowers
repetitive enhancement effect
recognition
perceptual mechanisms
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