Affective Touch and Face Recognition: Effects on Memory and Metacognitive Performance

Episodic memories can be shaped by various contextual factors. While social and sensory cues such as odors and music have been shown to influence encoding and retrieval, the role of tactile information remains unclear. In this preregistered study, we investigated the effects of affective touch on face memory. 57 healthy adults (40 women) completed the Cambridge Face Memory Tests and the Social Touch Questionnaire to assess general face recognition ability and attitudes toward social touch. During encoding, participants viewed neutral faces while receiving either static, dynamic, or no touch from a hidden experimenter and rated each face’s attractiveness and trustworthiness. Recognition was tested two days later. Outcome measures included recognition accuracy, metacognitive sensitivity (i.e., the ability of confidence ratings to distinguish between correct and incorrect responses), and judgments of attractiveness and trustworthiness. No significant differences emerged between touch conditions, and neither face recognition ability nor attitudes toward touch moderated these effects. Bayesian analyses provided moderate to strong evidence that brief social touch during encoding does not influence face memory or social evaluations. These findings suggest that brief touch in a laboratory context exerts minimal effects and that meaningful social context may be required for touch to impact memory processes.