Every day, we constantly recognize and process countless faces; faces of our friends, classmates, strangers, professors, etc. Of the innumerable number of faces we see a day, what dictates what makes some faces more memorable than others? New research suggests that our personal motives, and goals at a given time, have a profound effect on face perception and memory. In the article The Allure of Status: High-Status Targets Are Privileged in Face Processing and Memory, the authors examine the effects of social status on facial recognition and perception.<\/p>\n
Evidence suggests that our particular motives influence how we perceive faces: for example, men at a bar are more likely to notice attractive women at first in order to fulfill their goals associated with finding a mate. People also tend to selectively align themselves with who they perceive to be powerful and dominant individuals; this can explain why many women might be drawn more to a guy who is dressed well, or who is driving a nice car, since those are \u201cstatus\u201d symbols, representing the opportunity of a better life. The goal of the experiment was to see if higher-status faces could be recognized more frequently than lower-status faces, and how social status influences holistic processing (how we view faces as a whole rather than by individual features) and feature integration (how we create a unified representation by combining features).<\/p>\n
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First, experimenters tested the participants ability to solely recognize faces, by presenting them with a series of faces labeled with high status occupations–such as doctor or CEO–and occupations associated with lower-status–such as plumber or mechanic. Ultimately, the higher-status faces were identified more accurately and frequently than the lower status faces. Experimenters expanded on this by testing whether participants could recognize high-status faces when they weren\u2019t given a job title, but instead personality traits linked to elite or lower status. Faces on red cards had personalities associated with higher-paying jobs, and those on green cards had personalities associated with lower-paying jobs. Again, the higher-status individuals were recognized more often than the lower-status individuals. This, again, relates to how many people are attracted to wealth and status. For example, ever wonder how Donald Trump is consistently seen with beautiful younger women? Well, part of it can definitely be attributed to the fact they may be attracted to his social status, and the fact he is a powerful individual.<\/p>\n
In the final two sessions, experimenters tested if participants could remember the location of high and low-status faces, and how feature integration and holistic processing affects recognizing them. After being briefly exposed to the location of a series of faces paired with clothing associated with either high or low social status, participants played a matching game. The goal was to match them as quickly and accurately as possible, and ultimately, results showed that participants were more likely to remember where a face paired with higher-status clothing was, rather than someone with lower-status clothes; this was a significant finding because not only did participants have to recognize the faces, but they also had to remember their location.<\/p>\n
To test the effects of feature integration and holistic processing, faces were laterally split at the nose into top and bottom halves, with a small space separating them, as seen in the figure below. ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lh6.googleusercontent.com\/GDzpyPrkx_GulKYReLnmf9rFLeK3Ckog7VMl8q2TQ_l9SjAGz_NyGDAze6D8iwGcB3IhbwvjTDXRNrlTxZrmhkRqsADsUXznK-pAoQWvAKRmJp71b2ApESwAOQ\")
Ultimately, social-status affects attention, memory, and feature integration. Holistic processing is elicited more when recognizing high-status targets than low-status ones, and through the experiments, it\u2019s indicated we can partially control these processes (like how participants remember the location of high-status faces). All of this evidence supports the premise that particular motives can influence attention, processing, and memory, but this also has implications, such as eyewitness testimony. Face memory and relating an identity to a specific location are significant parts of eyewitness testimony, so it\u2019s troublesome that our legal system places so much weight on this when evidence suggests that people believed to be of a lower social status are much more subject to errors in recognition.<\/p>\n