Commentary: Shaping men's memory: the effects of a female's waist-to-hip ratio on men's memory for her appearance and biographical information.

Abstract

"But what the hell is it for?" asked Alan Baddeley (1988) about human memory. From an adaptive perspective, our mnemonic systems ought to be calibrated to retain information of high adaptive value i.e., that which promotes individual survival and reproduction (Tooby and Cosmides, 1989; Klein et al., 2002). To address the former, the last decade has seen the emergence of an extensive functionalist literature providing evidence of a survival mode in episodic memory (for a review, see Nairne and Pandeirada, 2016). These experiments characterize memory as the process of a general survival optimization system, attuned toward relevant stimulus. Regarding the latter part of nature's criterion, labs have examined the role of memory in courtship by exploring how contextual factors including jealousy (Maner et al., 2009), relationship status (Karremans et al., 2011), and primed infidelity (Schutzwohl and Koch, 2004) influence recall. Furthermore, generalized memory enhancements have been observed in response to attractive female faces (Maner et al., 2003; Becker et al., 2005). Inter-sex biases in men were interpreted as reflecting sensitivity to potential mates, while intra-sex biases in women were interpreted as serving to catalog quality competitors. Although these studies point toward functionally specialized cognitive modules, Fitzgerald et al. (2016) argue a focus on facial attractiveness is limited, since it is not the sole arbiter of mating decisions. Other potentially useful features include clothing, body shape, and social information (Buss, 1989). Moreover, physical characteristics of potential mates are only one component of the representation that is formed during an encounter. In addition to the appearance of who was there, people will need to remember that something occurred (what) at a particular time (when) in a particular place (where) (Nairne, 2015).