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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 16, 2025

How to Create and Use Binocular Rivalry

How to Create and Use Binocular Rivalry

Published on: November 10, 2010

Faces displaying dominance and trustworthiness do not automatically capture attention.

Yadvi Sharma¹, Parnian Jalalian¹, Siobhan Caughey²

¹School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK.

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)

|April 2, 2025

Summary

Personality impressions are not automatically formed from faces. Research shows that faces displaying dominance or trustworthiness do not capture attention, challenging spontaneous impression formation theories.

Keywords:

Person perception attentional bias dot-probe task face processing first impressions personality traits

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Social Psychology
Neuroscience

Background:

Current research challenges the idea that personality impressions are spontaneously formed from facial cues.
Previous findings suggest trait inferences require explicit judgment instructions.
It remains unclear if faces with key traits influence pre-attentive cognitive processes.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether faces varying in dominance and trustworthiness automatically capture attentional resources.
To test if fundamental character traits presented on faces influence lower-level cognition.
To examine the role of attentional capture in personality impression formation.

Main Methods:

Utilized a dot-probe task across three experiments.
Employed both naturalistic and computer-generated faces of men and women.
Manipulated facial expressions to convey dominance and trustworthiness.

Main Results:

Results were consistent across all three experiments.
Faces varying in dominance did not capture attention.
Faces varying in trustworthiness did not capture attention.

Conclusions:

Dominance and trustworthiness conveyed by faces do not automatically capture attentional resources.
Findings contest the notion that faces with fundamental character traits influence pre-attentive cognition.
The study has implications for understanding the automaticity of social perception and impression formation.