Abstract
Bayliss & Tipper (2006) demonstrated that faces that consistently shifted his/her gaze to subsequent target location in a gaze cueing task were chosen as being more trustworthy than faces that always looked away from it, suggesting that the predictability of the gaze cue affected the trustworthiness judgments of the faces. Furthermore, a recent study demonstrated that gaze-cueing effect was affected by the emotional valence of a target cued at by the gaze (Bayliss, Schuch, & Tipper, 2010). We investigated whether the personality judgment of a face would be affected by the valence of a target as well as the gaze cueing effect. On each trial, a face image with a straight gaze appeared, and then the eyes moved to either the left or right, followed by a target appeared next to the face. There were three types of the faces, each defined by the validity of the gaze cue. Predictive-valid faces always looked at the target. Predictive-invalid faces consistently looked away from the target. Neutral faces did not move their eyes during the trial. The participants had to indicate the location of the target by a key press. The targets were scene images that contained emotionally negative (e.g., snakes) or positive object (e.g., cakes). After the gaze-cueing trial, they evaluated perceived trustworthiness of the face. The results showed that the predictive-valid faces were evaluated more trustworthy than the predictive-invalid faces. Importantly, the predictive-valid faces which looked at the positive target were evaluated more trustworthy than those which looked at the negative targets. Although the valence of the targets modulated perceived trustworthiness of the predictive-invalid faces, the valence did not affect the trustworthiness judgments for the neutral faces. We suggest that the integrated effect of gaze information and the valence of a target would modulate personality impression of the face.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018