Joana Arantes

The Effect of Religious Clothing on Gaze Behavior : An Eye-Tracking Experiment

ABSTRACT There are very few experimental studies regarding religious clothing. In the current study, we hypothesized that the function of conservative clothing hiding female curvaceous body features is to restrict visual access and consequently decreases female physical attractiveness. Using eye-tracking, we quantified dwell times and number of fixations on religious clothing, ranging from conservative to liberal. Results showed that conservative religious clothing decreased visual access to female curvaceous body features and instead focused visual attention to the head/face region. Results were discussed in terms of the roles of conservative clothing in women’s clothing choice, men’s mate retention tactics, and parent-offspring conflict over mate choice.

Elimination of collaborative inhibition effect using the Method of Loci

BACKGROUND The disruption of retrieval strategies hypothesis (Basden, Basden, Bryner, & Thomas, 1997) has been identified as the main reason for the occurrence of the collaborative inhibition effect. This study aims to test this hypothesis applying the same retrieval strategy to all participants. METHOD To accomplish this, we compared nominal and collaborative (pairs) performance in a serial recall task in two conditions: use of own strategy vs. use of the method of loci, in a classic experimental paradigm of collaborative memory. RESULTS Results revealed that endowing participants with the same strategy of coding and retrieval of information eliminates the collaborative inhibition effect. CONCLUSIONS This result provides evidence for the hypothesis of the retrieval strategies disruption. The method of loci proved to be an effective mnemonic by increasing the amount of recalled information, both in the nominal and collaborative recall, when the information has to be recalled in the order that was presented.

Always on My Mind? Recognition of Attractive Faces May Not Depend on Attention

Little research has examined what happens to attention and memory as a whole when humans see someone attractive. Hence, we investigated whether attractive stimuli gather more attention and are better remembered than unattractive stimuli. Participants took part in an attention task – in which matrices containing attractive and unattractive male naturalistic photographs were presented to 54 females, and measures of eye-gaze location and fixation duration using an eye-tracker were taken – followed by a recognition task. Eye-gaze was higher for the attractive stimuli compared to unattractive stimuli. Also, attractive photographs produced more hits and false recognitions than unattractive photographs which may indicate that regardless of attention allocation, attractive photographs produce more correct but also more false recognitions. We present an evolutionary explanation for this, as attending to more attractive faces but not always remembering them accurately and differentially compared with unseen attractive faces, may help females secure mates with higher reproductive value.

Relationship quality influences attitudes toward and perceptions of infidelity

This study was conducted at the Psychology Research Centre (UID/PSI/01662/2013), University of Minho. Joana Arantes has been supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (IF/01298/2014). Andre Silva receives funding from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (PD/BD/115906/2016). We thank Randolph Grace for his helpful comments. The raw data reported in this study are available upon request.

Effect of Religious Day on Prosocial Behavior: A Field Study

ABSTRACT It has previously been suggested that prosociality is correlated with the degree of religiousness. However, experimental and meta-analytical studies cast doubt on the existence of such a relationship. Due to the controversy over the link between religiousness and prosocial behavior, and the existence of only a small number of ecological experiments focusing on this relationship, we tested the effect of a religious salient day, a previously uninvestigated effect, on prosocial behavior. Specifically, across two experiments (N = 405) and in an ecological setting in Portugal, we tested whether prosocial behavior would increase on a religious salient day compared to a non-religious regular day. We found a gender-related effect: Women, on a religious day, were more inclined to agree to a prosocial behavior than on a non-religious day, whereas men did not change their behavior. We discuss such a difference in behavior, as well as the implications of our studies.

Custos e Benefícios de Recordar em Colaboração: Breve Revisão da Literatura

Apos anos de pesquisa sobre o funcionamento da memoria humana como um processo de armazenamento e recordacao individual de informacao, surgem cada vez mais estudos focados na compreensao da memoria como um processo tambem vivido em grupo: a memoria colaborativa. Nesse sentido, o presente artigo pretendeu, atraves de uma revisao da literatura, sintetizar algumas das questoes mais relevantes do estudo da memoria colaborativa. Para tal, apresentamos o paradigma experimental mais usado nesse tipo de estudos, bem como os custos e beneficios que resultam da partilha e recordacao de informacao em grupo. A redacao deste artigo permitiu-nos concluir que, apesar do numero crescente de estudos nessa area, ainda existem algumas lacunas, nomeadamente no que se refere a producao de falsas memorias, bem como acerca da real implicacao pratica do uso de diferentes tarefas de memoria.