Abstract
Faces are extremely important stimuli in social life. People obtain diverse information from someone’s facial appearance, such as age, gender, emotions, etc. Evidence shows that people spontaneously form stable trustworthiness impressions from facial appearance rapidly, just like making a quick sketch. However, the functional significance of such mechanisms remains unclear. Therefore, the present study addressed this issue by examining whether extraction of trust information from faces modulates attentional orienting (the flexible hypothesis) or not (the reflexive hypothesis). In this study, participants performed a Posner’s cue-target task, in which we used faces that were rated for trustworthiness by another group beforehand as 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 (Experiment 1), which demonstrated that trustworthiness of facial appearance can modulate the gaze cueing effect. Moreover, the aforementioned trust modulation effect was not due to some low-level characteristics of the face stimuli (Experiment 2). Taken together, these results showed that trustworthiness of facial appearance modulates attentional orienting in gaze following. Our findings imply that the functional significance of the quick sketch with regard to trustworthiness may lie in attentional orienting, thus supporting the flexible hypothesis.