A subsequent experiment used the same computer-attention task to show that people who were prevented from gazing at attractive members of the opposite sex were actually more likely to remember them. After having 36 undergrads complete the computer task and then a distraction task, researchers tested the participants’ ability to pick out previously seen attractive faces from a lineup. As the researchers predicted, those whose attention was forcibly diverted — and thus had spent less time looking at attractive faces — were better at recognizing them later on. The effect held for both men and women.

Having shown that reining in a wandering eye leads people to devalue commitment and remember cute strangers better, in their final experiment the researchers wanted to see if the restriction would also make participants more vulnerable to attractive alternatives later on — at least in terms of attention. Indeed, testing a pool of 158 undergrads, of whom 42% were “dating casually” and 51% were in committed relationships, married or engaged, the researchers found that people whose attention was restricted in the computer task were measurably more engaged by attractive faces in a subsequent task, compared with people in the control group.