Peter Todd: Indiana University Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

The need to find nourishing foods is a selective pressure that may have shaped many human cognitive processes, from perception to memory. In this talk, I present some of our efforts to uncover such domain-specific influences. Hurlbert and Ling (2007) suggested that an ancestral sexual division of labor, with foraging females seeking out ripe fruits, could have led to a cross-cultural female preference for red hues. We have developed a novel approach to studies of sex differences and culture differences in color preference by analyzing the hue distributions of a large database of over 20 million color photographs on Flickr taken by men and women. While we find a general red-hue preference among women across cultures, we cannot attribute it to food-based images. In another study, we have found top-down influences of hunger on perceptual categorizations of edible versus non-edible items. Finally, we have been testing whether memory for recently eaten foods may be designed to let individuals track and respond to items that make them sick, leading to a forgetting pattern different from the usual decelerating decay seen in other domains.