Gaze Learning

Incidental learning of trust from gaze cues is weaker for other-race than own-race faces, but is just as strong for highly trustworthy and low trustworthy faces.

People can learn to make trust inferences on the basis of eye gaze behaviour. However, this study shows that these learned representations are not strengthened by a period of sleep, and are accessed without participants being explicitly aware of the behaviour that led to these feelings of trustworthiness. This suggests that rather than remembering specific episodes and using those memories to form impressions, we may form social representations of people (as trustworthy or untrustworthy) as a cost-saving device to save from having to remember their actual behaviour.

People can learn to make trust inferences on the basis of eye gaze behaviour. However, this study shows that these learned representations are not strengthened by a period of sleep, and are accessed without participants being explicitly aware of the behaviour that led to these feelings of trustworthiness. This suggests that rather than remembering specific episodes and using those memories to form impressions, we may form social representations of people (as trustworthy or untrustworthy) as a cost-saving device to save from having to remember their actual behaviour.

Incidental learning of trust from gaze cues can survive interference with task-relevant stimuli for up to one hour.

Incidental trust learning from identity-contingent gaze cues is affected by emotion, does not extend to non-trust-related judgements, and cannot be explained solely by visuomotor fluency.