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Sexually selective cognition in primates392et al., 2012; but see Wang et al., 2016). Similarly, a recent study (Lin et al., 2020) showed that perceiver age moderates the relationship between attractiveness and memory. Specifically, younger participants showed a more substantial memory bias for attractive faces compared to less attractive faces of young people, whereas older participants did not show this bias. From an evolutionary perspective, this is not surprising, as young adults are in the period of their lives where they experience the most sexual attraction. Therefore, memory bias for attractiveness in this age group would benefit mate choice. However, the moderating effects of demographic variables such as age and sex on recognition memory of attractive faces remain equivocal and require further investigation.An intriguing line of research has examined the effect of attractiveness on decision-making processes using signal detection theory. Interestingly, humans demonstrated more false alarms, meaning that they indicated that they recognized a face that was not previously presented, when the face was attractive than unattractive (Silva et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2016; Wiese et al., 2014). According to Silva et al. (2016), this false recognition bias can be adaptive because it results in increased salience of attractive people. With the idea that they have already seen attractive people, humans may be more likely to consider attractive people as suitable partners, even if they have not seen or met them before. Although this may sound like an appealing adaptive explanation, more parsimonious explanations should be considered. For example, as mentioned above, it could also be a by-product of the distinctiveness of unattractive faces. Nevertheless, poorer recognition accuracy for attractive faces seems to persist even when controlling for distinctiveness (Wiese et al., 2014). Alternatively, it could be argued that a more accurate memory of unattractive faces will help to avoid these in the future. This suggestion is in line with the idea that humans do not have a positive association with attractive faces per se, but seem to have a negative association with unattractive faces (Griffin & Langlois, 2006). However, this adaptive explanation remains untested, and based on current evidence, it seems that the apparent false recognition bias could indeed be driven specifically by attractiveness, even though the adaptive benefit of such a bias remains tentative. Altogether, the effect of attractiveness on recognition memory remains equivocal, as some studies suggest improved recognition accuracy for attractive faces, whereas others suggest the opposite. Although adaptive explanations have been proposed for both findings, there is still no clear consensus regarding the Tom Roth.indd 39 08-01-2024 10:41