Do you trust one’s gaze? Commonalities and differences in gaze-cueing effect between American and Japanese

Abstract

Direction of others’ gaze can guide one’s attentional orientation, an effect called the gaze-cueing effect. The present study examined relationships between the gaze-cueing effect and general trust (i.e., a cognitive bias in benevolence of human nature) across participants in the United States and Japan. American participants voluntarily followed the non-predictive cueing gaze irrespective of their general trust, while Japanese participants voluntarily ignored the gaze in response to the levels of their general trust. These results were largely consistent with the previous suggestion that Westerners tend to focus on an object independent of its context while Asians tend to attend the context and implies that individuals’ general trust levels may modulate early-stage visual processing such as detecting a visual object.