Age-related neural correlates of facial trustworthiness detection during economic interaction.

Abstract

Some economic transactions require people to trust strangers, whose trustworthiness is unknown. In these circumstances, behavioral studies have shown that adults (but not young adolescents) seem to have some minimal ability to detect the trustworthiness of adult strangers based on their facial features. In this study, we explored the neural correlates of this facial trustworthiness detection. A group of adolescents and adults played a series of economic Trust Games with adult trustees of which we had previously recorded the strategy. Results showed that when adult investors were looking at the picture of a trust-abusing trustee, the left amygdala was relatively more activated than when they were looking at a trust-honoring player. Younger adolescents did not show this pattern and responded with a more pronounced deactivation when facing a trust-abusing trustee. An exploratory whole-brain analysis detected a similar age shift for mentalizing regions of the brain. Our results fit with an emerging model suggesting that the amygdala is implicated in an associative learning process that progressively refines a mapping of faces onto trustworthy behavior and may result in avoiding to be exploited by untrustworthy strangers.

The smell of cooperativeness: Do human body odours advertise cooperative behaviours?

“…Interestingly, women's cooperative decisions become increasingly accurate with age. Both women's better performance over men and the influence of age on the performance at detecting cooperative traits was previously demonstrated in studies using facial pictures (De Neys et al, 2015; Salvia et al, 2020). Taken together, these findings suggest a development of cooperativeness detection across multiple sensory modalities.…”

“…Our explanatory variable ‘Donor Cooperativeness’ represented the two categories of the olfactory stimuli (high‐ vs. low‐cooperative donors). We included the variable ‘Age’ of the participants and its interactions with the explanatory variable into the model to examine whether the accuracy to predict cooperative intent increases with age as previously shown with faces (De Neys et al, 2015; Salvia et al, 2020). We also included the variable ‘Own Cooperativeness’ corresponding to the contribution allocated to the public good by each participant as a controlling variable.…”