Eye movements while judging faces for trustworthiness and dominance

Abstract

Past studies examining how people judge faces for trustworthiness and dominance have suggested that they use particular facial features (e.g. mouth features for trustworthiness, eyebrow and cheek features for dominance ratings) to complete the task. Here, we examine whether eye movements during the task reflect the importance of these features. We here compared eye movements for trustworthiness and dominance ratings of face images under three stimulus configurations: Small images (mimicking large viewing distances), large images (mimicking face to face viewing), and a moving window condition (removing extrafoveal information). Whereas first area fixated, dwell times, and number of fixations depended on the size of the stimuli and the availability of extrafoveal vision, and varied substantially across participants, no clear task differences were found. These results indicate that gaze patterns for face stimuli are highly individual, do not vary between trustworthiness and dominance ratings, but are influenced by the size of the stimuli and the availability of extrafoveal vision.

Face masks inhibit facial cues for approachability and trustworthiness: an eyetracking study

“…The masked-up region was important to consider because this region obscured the lips/mouth, an important part of the face during social interaction (Calvo et al, 2018 ; Hermens et al, 2018 ; Sutherland et al, 2015 ; Willis et al, 2011a ). Hence, we performed separate pairwise comparisons for masked region AOI, but only for the trustworthiness and approachability block as gaze intensity occurs only when an eye contact was first made to detect another’s gaze (Cavallo et al, 2015 ; Cui et al, 2019 ).…”

“…All instructions were presented on screen. Our procedures were similar to Hermens et al ( 2018 ). There were three blocks of trials, i.e., trustworthiness, approachability, and gaze intensity (Hermens et al, 2018 ); the block order was randomised.…”

“…Notwithstanding the above, a recent study found that while smiling expression, particularly the accompanying mouth shape and bottom lip curving, are related to trustworthy faces, there is a difference in terms of fixation density on the mouth area of happy faces when people make judgments of a face’s happiness and trustworthiness, with a higher score for the former (Calvo et al, 2018 ; Hermens et al, 2018 ; Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008 ). This suggests that there is still a distinction between happiness and trustworthiness inferences, whereas the association between happiness and approachability seems more direct (Batty, 2020 ; Sutherland et al, 2015 ; Willis et al, 2011a ).…”

“…This suggests that there is still a distinction between happiness and trustworthiness inferences, whereas the association between happiness and approachability seems more direct (Batty, 2020 ; Sutherland et al, 2015 ; Willis et al, 2011a ). Further eye-tracking studies involving face stimuli and various facial expressions also showed that while happy faces had longer dwell time around the mouth region as compared to the eyes, people tend to scan the eyes, nose and mouth region when assessing trustworthy face, and there was no distinct dominant facial region that could signal and predict trustworthiness, which instead relied on an integration of the cues from the various facial features (Eisenbarth & Alpers, 2011 ; Hermens et al, 2018 ). Calvo et al ( 2018 ) attributed such face-scanning gaze behaviour to the need to seek expressive congruency from the various facial cue sources when judging trustworthiness, e.g., a smiling expression but unhappy eyes do not signal truthfulness or reliability and thus would not be regarded as trustworthy.…”

“…Hence, while a smile, displayed primarily by the mouth region, is diagnostic of happiness, which is a close inference of approachability, a smile may not be distinctively diagnostic of trustworthiness which is likely dependent on the processing of other facial regions, particularly, the eye region which is also a critical cue for face evaluation (Calvo et al, 2018 ; Eisenbarth & Alpers, 2011 ; Hermens et al, 2018 ; Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008 ).…”