Follow Because I Believe You:Trust Modulates The Gaze Cueing Effect

Faces are extremely important stimuli in social life,from which people can obtain diverse information(e.g.,age,gender,emotion).Researchers found that people spontaneously formed stable impressions of trustworthiness from faces rapidly.However,the functional significance of such mechanisms in social interactions remains unclear.In the present study,we focused on the function of attentional orienting.We explored the functional significance of trust information extraction by examining whether it modulates attentional orienting(the flexible hypothesis)or not(the reflexive hypothesis).Participants performed a Posner’s cue-target task.We took the faces rated for trustworthiness by another group beforehand as experimental stimuli(more-trustworthy vs.less-trustworthy).Results showed that the gaze cueing effect occurred in the more-trustworthy condition but not in the less-trustworthy condition(Experiments 1 and 3),which was due to the trust information in faces(Experiment 4)instead of low-level characteristics of the face stimuli(Experiments2).The results supported the flexible hypothesis,demonstrating that the trustworthiness of facial appearance modulated attentional orienting in gaze following.These findings implied that the functional significance of the quick sketch of trustworthiness might lie in attentional orienting,thus benefits our social interactions.