Impact of trust violations on Attentional Bias and working memory updating

Abstract

Trust violations harm individuals’ behaviors and emotions, while their impact on cognition remains unclear. We explored whether trust violations influence two cognitive processes: attentional bias and working memory updating. We used the trust game to manipulate the trust violation. Fifty-one female participants (17–24 years; M = 19.73 years) performed dot-probe task and n-back task. The dot-probe task was adopted to measure the time-course (cues presentation: 200 ms, 500 ms) of two attentional bias components: attention engagement and attention disengagement; the n-back task was used to measure working memory updating under four memory loads (0, 1, 2, 3). Results showed the violated group had significantly higher attention engagement scores and disengagement scores for angry faces than zero during the presentation of the 200 ms cue. The reaction time of the violated group is longer than that of the control group under the two and three memory load. These results indicate that the trust violation facilitates attention engagement towards negative stimuli and impairs attention disengagement from those stimuli. It also causes damage to the ability of working memory updating. The imbalance between impulsive and reflective system is the main consequence of trust violation.