Targeted Memory Reactivation

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.