More Memory Bang for the Attentional Buck: Self-Protection Goals Enhance Encoding Efficiency for Potentially Threatening Males

Abstract

When encountering individuals with a potential inclination to harm them, people face a dilemma: Staring at them provides useful information about their intentions but may also be perceived by them as intrusive and challenging-thereby increasing the likelihood of the very threat the people fear. One solution to this dilemma would be an enhanced ability to efficiently encode such individuals-to be able to remember them without spending any additional direct attention on them. In two experiments, the authors primed self-protective concerns in perceivers and assessed visual attention and recognition memory for a variety of faces. Consistent with hypotheses, self-protective participants (relative to control participants) exhibited enhanced encoding efficiency (i.e., greater memory not predicated on any enhancement of visual attention) for Black and Arab male faces-groups stereotyped as being potentially dangerous-but not for female or White male faces. Results suggest that encoding efficiency depends on the functional relevance of the social information people encounter.

Figure 1

Mean gaze duration (in seconds) as a function of face type and motivation condition (control vs. self-protection), Experiment 1

Figure 2

Mean recognition accuracy (corrected for guessing) as a function of face type and motivation condition (control vs. self-protection), Experiment 1

Figure 3

This figure depicts the priming effects in Experiment 1—the mean in the self-protection condition minus the mean in the control condition—as estimated by the multilevel regression model including gaze duration as a varying covariate Note: The bars indicate 95% confidence intervals for the priming benefits (or costs) evaluated at the grand mean for gaze duration.

Figure 4

This figure depicts the priming effects in Experiment 2—the mean in the self-protection condition minus the mean in the control condition—as estimated by the multilevel regression model including gaze duration as a varying covariate Note: The bars indicate 95% confidence intervals for the priming benefits (or costs) evaluated at the grand mean for gaze duration.