The Impact of Facial Trustworthiness and Attractiveness on Gaze Processing in 7-month-old Infants

• In Event: 3-124 - The Specificity of Face-Trait Inferences in Infants and Children

Integrative Statement

When encountering an unknown person, adults as well as infants reliably and automatically judge that person to be more or less trustworthy solely based on facial appearance (Todorov et al., 2008, Jessen & Grossmann, 2016). While adults are known to also use this information as guidance in decision making, both in the laboratory and in real life (Rezlescu et al., 2012; Ert et al., 2016), it is unknown to what degree perceived facial trustworthiness influences other cognitive processes in infants.

I will present two studies addressing this topic by investigating the impact of facial trustworthiness as well as a second facial feature, namely attractiveness, on eye gaze perception, a crucial attentional cue in social interactions. In a first electroencephalographic (EEG) study, 31 7-month-old infants were presented with faces high or low in trustworthiness that shifted their eye gaze to left or right side. We investigated the horizontal electrooculographic (hEOG) response during gaze shift as well as the event-related brain potential (ERP) response to an object presented either congruent or incongruent with the direction of gaze. In the hEOG response, we observed a main effect of congruency [F(1,21) = 4.654, p = .043, ηp2 = .18] but no impact of trustworthiness, suggesting the use of gaze as an attentional cue irrespective of facial trustworthiness. In contrast, later brain responses, in particular the Nc response to the object, indicate a differential allocation of attention dependent on facial trustworthiness [F(1,24) = 4.382, p = .047, ηp2 = .15].

In a second study, using eyetracking, we sought to differentiate the impact of facial trustworthiness from the impact of facial attractiveness, another subtle facial feature that infants are known to discriminate (see eg. Rubenstein et al., 1999). To that end, 7-month-olds were presented with faces varying in attractiveness but matched in trustworthiness that shifted their gaze to the left or right side. Initial results from 13 infants suggest that facial attractiveness influences the processing of gaze information; infants follow the gaze of faces high in attractiveness with a higher probability compared to faces low in attractiveness [33.7 7 % (M SE) vs. 21.0 6 %].

In sum, our studies suggest that facial trustworthiness and facial attractiveness both influence gaze processing in infancy but do so in different ways. While attractiveness appears to influence gaze following directly, trustworthiness rather impacts the evaluation of an associated object. Hence, facial trustworthiness and attractiveness appear as two related but non-identical dimensions of facial features that are already processed in infancy, providing evidence for the existence of an elaborate and detailed face processing mechanism early in development.

Author

• Sarah Jessen, Department of Neurology, University of Luebeck
  Presenting Author