Investigating the formation and consolidation of incidentally learned trust.

James W A Strachan,Steven P Tipper,M Gareth Gaskell,Anika K Smith,Anna Á Váli Guttesen,Scott A Cairney

doi:10.1037/xlm0000752

James W A Strachan, Steven P Tipper + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000752

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Abstract

People make inferences about the trustworthiness of others based on their observed gaze behavior. Faces that consistently look toward a target location are rated as more trustworthy than those that look away from the target. Representations of trust are important for future interactions; yet little is known about how they are consolidated in long-term memory. Sleep facilitates memory consolidation for incidentally learned information and may therefore support the retention of trust representations. We investigated the consolidation of trust inferences across periods of sleep or wakefulness. In addition, we employed a memory cueing procedure (targeted memory reactivation [TMR]) in a bid to strengthen certain trust memories over others. We observed no difference in the retention of trust inferences following delays of sleep or wakefulness, and there was no effect of TMR in either condition. Interestingly, trust inferences remained stable 1 week after learning, irrespective of the initial postlearning delay. A second experiment showed that this implicit learning occurs despite participants’ being unable to explicitly recall the gaze behavior of specific faces immediately after encoding. Together, these results suggest that gist-like, social inferences are formed at the time of learning without retaining the original episodic memory and thus do not benefit from offline consolidation through replay. We discuss our findings in the context of a novel framework whereby trust judgments reflect an efficient, powerful, and adaptable storage device for social information.

Highlights

People make inferences about the trustworthiness of others based on their observed gaze behavior
It is important to note that there was evidence of decay in trust learning— differences between trustworthiness ratings of valid and invalid identities were smaller following a week-long gap than they were initially following gaze-cueing. As this is the first study to measure trust learning at multiple time points we cannot draw conclusions from this decay, but it could be an avenue for future research to investigate this further
This decay in trust learning may be mitigated by contextual or relevance factors—it may not be worth the mental resources to indefinitely preserve the memory of an unfamiliar face that appeared on a screen, unless there is reason to expect that such a representation may be relevant in the longer term

Summary

Introduction

People make inferences about the trustworthiness of others based on their observed gaze behavior. A second experiment showed that this implicit learning occurs despite participants’ being unable to explicitly recall the gaze behavior of specific faces immediately after encoding Together, these results suggest that gist-like, social inferences are formed at the time of learning without retaining the original episodic memory and do not benefit from offline consolidation through replay. The effect has been replicated with an economic trust game, showing that the consequences of this learning extend beyond facial trustworthiness judgments: participants were willing to invest in, and even incur real-world costs for, valid-cueing faces over invalid-cueing faces (Rogers et al, 2014). This learned trust appears to be attuned to monitoring the untrustworthiness of invalid faces (Strachan et al, 2016; Strachan & Tipper, 2017)

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