Face first impression of trustworthiness in Williams Syndrome: dissociating automatic vs decision based perception
Year: 2019
Type: preprint
Abstract: The present material refers to the procedure used in the article by Gomez et al. published in Cortex (2019). Summary: When interacting with strangers, humans make fast decisions of trustworthiness based on others’ facial appearance. We investigated this behaviour in Williams Syndrome (WS), a genetic disorder linked to social disturbances. We recorded eye-movements in neurotypically-developed (TD) subjects (N=21) and in WS patients (N=22) while passively viewing trustworthiness-modulated pair of virtual faces (spontaneous task) and while selecting the face best fitting a social character (decision task). During spontaneous viewing, TD subjects gazed significantly longer at trustworthy faces while WS patients showed no differences in looking-time preferences for one face over the other. In the decision task, however, like TD, patients gazed longer at trustworthy faces that they additionally correctly matched with the corresponding social description. Nevertheless, improvements in the decision task were conditional to patients’ performance on the emotional NEPSY scale. Endogenous representation of trustworthiness is impaired in WS while top-down mechanisms of trust recognition are partially preserved. These results have implications for WS social skills remediation. Please note that the Stimuli were retrieved from the Todorov database on his website: http://tlab.princeton.edu/databases/25-maximally-distinct-identities-trustworthiness/
Source: OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints)
Authors: Angela Sirigu, Guillaume Lio, Alice Gomez
Language: English
Topic: Williams Syndrome Research
Subfield: Developmental Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7046986000