Abstract
Previous research has demonstrated that facial appearance biases source memory. Prior work has also shown that differences in social orientations between cultures influence cognitive processing. Combining these ideas, this study explored how culture may impact the use of appearance-based biases in source memory for different kinds of behaviors. This work investigated the contribution to source memory of babyfaceness, a facial quality known to elicit strong spontaneous trait inferences. Young adults originating from the US or East Asia viewed Caucasian and Chinese babyfaced and mature-faced individuals paired with sentences that were either congruent (e.g., babyfaced-submissive) or incongruent (e.g., babyfaced-dominant) with facial characteristics. Although the predicted effects did not emerge, we found some potentially interesting trends. When analyses were restricted to individuals whose “ingroup” was represented by the stimuli (i.e., only Chinese East Asians and all Americans), memory for dominant and submissive behaviors varied by face-behavior congruity. When faces were incongruent with behaviors, participants marginally remembered more mature-faced individuals who performed submissive behaviors than babyfaced individuals who performed dominant behaviors. This relationship was not apparent for congruent face-behavior pairs. This potentially supports previous evidence of a broad “expectancy violation system” in memory. Overall, this study serves as preliminary work that may motivate potential future work regarding many open questions about the roles of cultural upbringing and individual differences in the use of appearance-based inferences in source memory.