The Effect of Trust on Gaze-Mediated Attentional Orienting
Metadata
Show full item recordEditorial
Frontiers Media
Materia
Trustworthiness Trust Gaze-cueing Gaze-cueing effect Attentional orienting
Date
2020-07-15Referencia bibliográfica
Barbato M, Almulla AA and Marotta A (2020) The Effect of Trust on Gaze-Mediated Attentional Orienting. Front. Psychol. 11:1554. [doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01554]
Sponsorship
Zayed University R19057Abstract
The last two decades have witnessed growing interest in the study of social cognition
and its multiple facets, including trust. Interpersonal trust is generally understood as
the belief that others are not likely to harm you. When meeting strangers, judgments
of trustworthiness are mostly based on fast evaluation of facial appearance, unless
information about past behavior is available. In the past decade, studies have tried to
understand the complex relationship between trust and gaze-cueing of attention (GCA)
(i.e., attentional orienting following another person’s gaze). This review will focus on
the studies that used a gaze-cueing paradigm to explore this relationship. While the
predictivity of the gaze-cue seems to consistently influence trustworthiness judgments,
the impact of trust on gaze-cueing is less clear. Four studies found enhanced gazecueing effects with trustworthy faces; one found stronger effects of gaze-cueing with
faces associated with undesirable behavior, but only when the observer’s personal
evaluations were taken into account. Four studies did not observe an effect of trust
on gaze-cueing. Overall, studies have highlighted the complexity of this relationship,
suggesting that multiple factors (including age, gender, the characteristics of the
observer, and whether or not a threat is perceived) are likely to intervene in the
interplay between trust and gaze-triggered attentional orienting. After discussing results
in the context of existing theories of gaze-cueing and trust, we conclude that further
investigation is needed to better understand this relationship and the contribution of
social factors to attentional shifts guided by gaze.