Eye See Your Intentions: Age-Related Differences in Gaze Perception and Trustworthiness Attributions

Successful social interactions depend on regulating approach-avoidance tendencies as well as accurately understanding those motivations in others. Direct gaze signals approach intentions, whereas averted gaze signals avoidance intentions. Older relative to younger adults display a stronger direct gaze bias (i.e., are more likely to perceive eye gaze as direct vs. averted). This bias in motivational cue perception likely impacts social trait attributions. This study, for the first time, leveraged a lifespan sample across a wide age range (18 – 88 years; N = 307) to investigate adult lifespan differences in gaze perception using a novel set of gaze-modified face stimuli with varying expressions and tested whether perception of gaze aversion affected attributions of facial trustworthiness. Participants were recruited and the study conducted online via Prolific. Faces with more averted gaze were perceived as more direct-looking with age. This bias was relatively weaker for fearful faces compared to all other facial expressions. Further, greater perception of direct gaze was associated with greater facial trustworthiness attributions, and especially with age. Combined, these findings confirm a direct gaze bias in aging and support its impact on social trait attributions. These adult lifespan differences in approach-avoidance motivational cue perception may reflect shifts in sensitivity, capacity, and/or motivation and are discussed as a possible mechanism in greater trust and susceptibility to deception with age. This work also adds substantially to the widely used FACES Lifespan Database corpus by making the newly gaze-modified faces, and their norm ratings, publicly available for research on motivational and cognitive aging.