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

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Evolutionary Psychology

Background:

• The behavioral immune system (BIS) comprises processes preventing infections.
• Attention and memory are crucial for survival and potentially play a role in the BIS.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how activating the BIS affects attention and memory.
• To examine if infectious disease concerns prime individuals for enhanced perception and recall.

Main Methods:

• Participants were primed with infectious or non-infectious disease concerns using film clips.
• An exogenous attentional task with face distractors was performed.
• A surprise face recognition memory task followed.

Main Results:

• Participants primed with infectious disease concerns showed higher accuracy in the attentional task.
• No significant differences were observed in response times during the attention task.
• Memory performance did not differ between the infectious disease and control groups.

Conclusions:

• BIS activation may induce a general hypervigilant state.
• Priming the BIS via contextual cues may not be sufficient to enhance mnemonic mechanisms.