Department of Psychology, University of Florence, Via di San Salvi 26, 50100 Firenze, Italy.
Biol Psychol. 2010 May;84(2):192-205. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2010.01.013. Epub 2010 Jan 28.
Facial attractiveness plays a key role in human social and affective behavior. To study the time course of the neural processing of attractiveness and its influence on recognition memory we investigated the event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited in an old/new recognition task in response to faces with a neutral expression that, at encoding, were rated for their attractiveness. Highly attractive faces elicited a specific early positive-going component on frontal sites; in addition, with respect to less attractive faces, they elicited larger later components related to structural encoding and recognition memory. All in all, our results show that facial attractiveness, independently from facial expression, modulates face processing throughout all stages from encoding to retrieval.
面部吸引力在人类社会和情感行为中起着关键作用。为了研究吸引力的神经加工的时间进程及其对识别记忆的影响，我们在一项旧/新识别任务中调查了事件相关电位（ERP），该任务对中性表情的面孔做出吸引力评价，然后对这些面孔进行编码。高度有吸引力的面孔在前额部位引发了一个特定的早期正向前走的成分；此外，与吸引力较低的面孔相比，它们引发了与结构编码和识别记忆相关的更大的后期成分。总的来说，我们的结果表明，面部吸引力独立于面部表情，调节从编码到检索的所有阶段的面部处理。
