Should Eye Trust You?

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 predictivevalid 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. When people observe someone looking in a particular direction, their attention is shifted to the same location in space (Driver et al., 1999; Friesen & Kingstone, 1998; Hietanen, 1999; Langton & Bruce, 1999). This shift of attention results in reaction time (RT) advantages for targets appearing at that location, compared with targets at other locations. In development, this joint attention is pivotal for language and theory-of-mind development (Charman, 2003; Moore & Dunham, 1995). Because reading the mind from the eyes is so important to social interactions (BaronCohen, 1995, 2000), gaze behavior may play a key role in personality evaluation and person perception (Hood, Macrae, ColeDavies, & Dias, 2003; Kleinke, 1986; Macrae, Hood, Milne, Rowe, & Mason, 2002; Mason, Hood, & Macrae, 2004; Mason, Tatkow, & Macrae, 2005). When encountering another individual, one forms a stronger memory trace of that person if his or her gaze is directed toward oneself than if it is directed elsewhere (e.g., Mason et al., 2004). Further, people find individuals who make direct eye contact more trustworthy and more attractive than individuals who do not make eye contact (e.g., Mason et al., 2005). However, it should be noted that prolonged direct gaze can be seen as threatening (Argyle & Cook, 1976) and increases arousal (Nichols & Champness, 1971). Interestingly, even though gaze direction and face identity appear to be encoded in different neural structures (superior temporal sulcus and fusiform gyrus, respectively; e.g., Hoffman & Haxby, 2000), fusiform faceidentification processing can be modulated by gaze direction, with activation increasing when gaze is directed toward the viewer (e.g., Pelphrey, Singerman, Allison, & McCarthy, 2003). These effects show that direct gaze influences person perception. However, in addition to indicating an individual’s intentions regarding interactions with other members of a social group, gaze behavior is an excellent cue regarding the object a person is currently interested in. An animal that becomes aware of the presence of an interesting object—for example, a food source, a predator, or the dominant member of the group—will look toward that object. The knowledge that other group members’ orienting is driven to important objects enables animals with gaze-following abilities to use gaze cues to become aware of events and objects that they otherwise would not notice. Even in humans, shifts in joint attention that are evoked by gaze cues seem impervious to the nature of the face producing the gaze shift. This makes it difficult to conclude that these shifts have any impact on, or are influenced by, person perception processes. Whether a cartoon face (e.g., Friesen & Kingstone, 1998) or a single photograph of a face produces the cue seems to make little difference (e.g., Driver et al., 1999). Furthermore, Address correspondence to Andrew P. Bayliss, School of Psychology, Brigantia Building, Penrallt Rd., University of Wales, Bangor, Gwynedd, LL57 2AS United Kingdom, e-mail: a.bayliss@bangor. ac.uk. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 514 Volume 17—Number 6 Copyright r 2006 Association for Psychological Science Frischen and Tipper (2004) showed that gaze cuing is not modulated by whether the same face is presented for hundreds of trials or a different face appears on every trial, suggesting that novelty of face identity has no influence on joint attention. Even more striking, the emotional expression, such as fear or anger, of the face producing the gaze shift has no effect on the magnitude of cuing (Hietanen & Leppanen, 2003), except in participants with high state and trait anxiety (Mathews, Fox, Yiend, & Calder, 2003). Even though the properties of a face appear to have no influence on the rapid and automatic shifts of attention evoked by gaze shifts, it does not follow that the opposite relation cannot be found. That is, a shift in joint attention triggered by gaze may influence the perception of the individual producing the gaze shift. Outside the laboratory, gaze direction is usually a highly accurate indicator of the location of interesting objects; even young children understand this. For example, Friere, Eskritt, and Lee (2004) have shown that from the age of 4 years, children use gaze direction to locate objects despite conflicting verbal information (e.g., an adult looks to a hidden object but states, ‘‘I don’t know where it is’’). However, during competition between individuals, gaze shifts can be used to deceive (see Emery, 2000, for review). Consider, for example, a basketball player’s feint; the player gazes to the left, but then makes a quick pass to the right. To use such tactics, the player must know that automatic encoding of gaze direction will lead opponents not only to follow the gaze cue, but also to predict a leftward action. Detecting such deceivers is important, and indeed, previous studies have shown that the faces of deceivers are encoded more strongly into memory than those of cooperators (Yamagishi, Tanida, Mashima, Shimoma, & Kanazawa, 2003). Further, trustworthiness judgments of faces are affected in simple computerized games in which faces can be associated with either cooperative or deceptive behavior, such that cooperative faces are judged to be more trustworthy than deceptive ones (Singer, Kiebel, Winston, Dolan, & Frith, 2004). In the current study, we manipulated the predictability of gaze cuing. Some faces were completely unpredictive, in that half the time they looked toward the subsequent location of a target (valid trials) and half the time they looked to the opposite side of space (invalid trials). This is the usual gaze-cuing procedure. Other faces always gazed toward the subsequent location of the target, and so they were ‘‘cooperative.’’ A final group of faces always looked away from the subsequent location of the target, and so they were ‘‘deceivers.’’ Given previous research, we predicted that the nature of the individuals making the gaze shift would not clearly influence participants’ rapid and automatic shifts of attention. That is, we expected that the gaze-cuing effects would not differ consistently across the different types of stimulus faces. However, the relation between gaze-cuing contingency and face identity might nevertheless be encoded and influence person perception. Thus, if people link helpful and unhelpful gaze-evoked attention shifts to the identity of the persons who produce these gaze cues, then the faces that always cooperated would seem more trustworthy than the faces that never looked toward the correct target location. If, however, such gaze-cuing episodes occur completely separately from person-perception processes, then personality judgments would be unaffected by whether the faces were cooperators or deceivers. For half our subjects, we also investigated whether the deceptive faces made more of an impact on memory than the cooperative faces (Yamagishi et al., 2003). If our predictions were borne out by the data, this study would provide the first evidence that the attention shifts induced by observing another person’s averted gaze have consequences regarding the evaluation of that person’s personality.