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Published on: May 15, 2019
Predictive gaze cues and personality judgments: Should eye trust you?
Andrew P Bayliss1, Steven P Tipper
1Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, School of Psychology, University of Wales, Bangor, United Kingdom. a.bayliss@bangor.ac.uk
Psychological Science
|June 15, 2006
Summary
People judge faces that reliably direct attention as more trustworthy. This trust bias is weaker in individuals with autistic-like traits and may involve memory encoding of deceptive cues.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Social Neuroscience
- Visual Perception
Background:
- Gaze-following is crucial for social interaction.
- Gaze cues can be manipulated to deceive.
- Understanding gaze perception informs social cognition.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how gaze-cuing reliability influences trustworthiness judgments.
- To explore the relationship between autistic-like traits and gaze-based trust.
- To examine memory encoding of deceptive versus cooperative gaze cues.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a gaze-cuing paradigm with predictive-valid, predictive-invalid, and nonpredictive faces.
- Assessed participants' trustworthiness ratings of faces.
- Administered a scale for autistic-like traits.
- Examined memory recall for presented faces.
Main Results:
- Participants rated predictive-valid faces as more trustworthy than predictive-invalid faces.
- This trustworthiness bias was negatively correlated with autistic-like traits.
- Tentative evidence suggests "deceptive" faces were encoded more strongly in memory.
Conclusions:
- Gaze perception interacts with attention, facial recognition, and personality judgments.
- Trustworthiness judgments are influenced by gaze reliability, with implications for social cognition.
- Individual differences, such as autistic-like traits, modulate gaze-based social evaluations.
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