The Effect of Attractiveness on Recognition Memory for Faces

The ability to identify the faces of people one has seen before is important in everyday life, and adults and children show a high level of performance in recognizing faces after a single presentation. For example, Yin (1969) found fewer errors in the recognition of faces than in the recognition of houses, airplanes, or stick figures. Scapinello and Yarmey (1970) reported that faces were remembered better than pictures of dogs and of buildings; and Goldstein and Chance (1970) noted that there was a higher proportion of faces recognized than of ink blots or photographs of snow crystals. While faces in general appear to be better remembered than other homogeneous pictorial material, some experimenters have noted that faces differ in their memorability. Cross, Cross, and Daly (1971) suggest that one characteristic distinguishing more memorable faces from less memorable ones is 'beauty.' They report an experiment in which subjects were better at recognizing faces they had previously identified as 'attractive' than those they had not so identified. Cross et al. required their subjects to scan an array of photographs to select the attractive faces, and while the authors reject an explanation of their results in terms of differences in time spent looking at faces of different attractiveness, they do not present any evidence on that inspection time. Cross et al. offer the hypothesis that attractive faces are more actively attended to, but studies in verbal learning indicate that evaluative judgments of words are associated with their ease of recall. Amster (1964) found that words evaluated as 'good' were recalled better than words