Predictive gaze cues and personality judgments: Should eye trust you?

Abstract

Although following another person's gaze is essential in fluent social interactions, the reflexive nature of this gaze-cuing effect means that gaze can be used to deceive. In a gaze-cuing procedure, participants were presented with several faces that looked to the left or right. Some faces always looked to the target (predictive-valid), some never looked to the target (predictive-invalid), and others looked toward and away from the target in equal proportions (nonpredictive). The standard gaze-cuing effects appeared to be unaffected by these contingencies. Nevertheless, participants tended to choose the predictive-valid faces as appearing more trustworthy than the predictive-invalid faces. This effect was negatively related to scores on a scale assessing autistic-like traits. Further, we present tentative evidence that the "deceptive" faces were encoded more strongly in memory than the "cooperative" faces. These data demonstrate the important interactions among attention, gaze perception, facial identity recognition, and personality judgments.

Fig. 1

Examples of the time course of two trials containing a predictive-valid face. Throughout an experimental session, this person always looked to the subsequent target location. For other participants, this person always looked away from the target or was nonpredictive of target location.

Fig. 2

Percentage of predictive-valid (i.e., cooperative) faces chosen over predictive-invalid (i.e., deceptive) faces, for each of the following three questions: “Which face do you find more trustworthy?” (n = 40), “Which face do you prefer?” and “Which face do you think was presented most often during the experiment?” (both ns = 20). Chance performance was 50%.