Incidental learning of trust: Examining the role of emotion and visuomotor fluency.

Eye gaze is a powerful directional cue that automatically evokes joint attention states.Even when faces are ignored there is incidental learning of the reliability of the gaze cueing of another person, such that people who look away from targets are judged less trustworthy.In a series of experiments we demonstrate further properties of the incidental learning of trust from gaze direction.First, the emotion of the face, whether neutral or smiling, influences the pattern of trust learning.Second, the effect is specific to judgements of trust; reliability of gaze direction does not influence other emotional judgements of a person, such as liking.And third, visuomotor fluency is not sufficient for learning of trust, regardless of whether the face serves as a target or distractor.Taken together, incidental learning of trust is influenced by facial emotion, it is a specific effect that does not generalize to other emotional assessments, and it is not determined solely by processing fluency.