How the Mind Warps: A Social Evolutionary Perspective on Cognitive Processing Disjunctions: Douglas T. Kenrick, Andrew W. Delton, Theresa E. Robertson, D. Vaughn Becker, and Steven L. Neuberg

I f you walk down a crowded street at noon, which of the passing strangerscould you pick out of a lineup an hour later? From the standpoint ofcommon sense, and of the traditional model of attention and memory, your ability to remember other people ought to depend on initial visual attention-you’ll encode those faces you spent more time looking at, and later remember those encoded faces that managed to make it into long-term memory. Our research program on basic social cognitive processes began with just this set of apparently straightforward assumptions-that memory for faces will depend on encoding, which will in turn depend directly on initial visual

attention (e.g., Craik & Tulving, 1975). We were surprised to find that we were wrong.