The contribution of social interaction information on enhanced memory for mutually facing dyads

Human faces serve as important nonverbal cues in social situations. To be successful in the social world, we require the ability to accurately encode information about human faces into long-term memory for later use. While most previous research on memorizing faces has focused on faces of people in isolation, one recent study found better long-term memory for information associated with pairs of faces when the faces were initially shown facing each other rather than facing away. However, the mechanism underlying this effect remains unknown. We were able to replicate this finding of enhanced memory for pairs of mutually facing dyads in profile view (Experiments 1, 3, 4, and 5), as well as for pairs of frontally oriented faces that were shown by their eye position to be gazing at each other (Experiment 6). However, we did not find any such enhanced memory effect for pairs of arrows (Experiment 2) or fans (Experiments 3, 4, and 5) that were presented in a mutually facing configuration. We also found that the enhanced memory effect appeared in the context of a positive social relationship but not in the context of a negative relationship (Experiments 7 and 8). Overall, these findings consistently indicate that interacting dyads are more effectively retained in long-term memory, with this enhanced memory driven by domain-specific social mechanisms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).