The Effect Of Mating-Related Situation On Study-Time Allocation For Faces Varies In Face Attractiveness

Mating is important for humans’ survive. Finding an opposite-sex mate and retaining their mate are major challenge most humans should face. Although a growing number of empirical studies revealed that mating-related situation or cues would activate individual’s adaptive cognitive process, which is’’historically associated with success for the attainment of such goals’, little is known about whether mate-related situations affect self-regulated learning. Learning is important for humans to solve specific adaptive problems in changeable situations. The present study attempt to answer this question by combined the evolutionary psychology approach and learning approach.In four studies, participants in mate-related situation conditions (study 1 and 3: mate-search situation; study 2 and 4:mate-guarding situation) or control conditions (both manipulated by a guided imagery procedure) studied the female faces or face-name associations varies in face attractiveness. Half of them used the self-paced study time as the dependent variable (study 1 and 2), half of them used the item-selection as the dependent variable (study 3 and 4).The present findings revealed that mating situation affect the study-time allocation for face varies in face attractiveness. Compared to the control conditions, participants in mating-related situation (study 1&3:mate-search conditions; study 2&4:mate-guarding situation) spend more time in highly attractive than less attractive female faces, or prefer to selected the highly-attractive face-name associations to study for, while participants in the control condition allocated equivalent time to the two groups of female faces or chose the faces for chance. The present study as a preliminary attempt to bridge the self-regulated learning and evolutionary psychology approaches by explored the effects on mating situation to self-paced study for faces.