Abstract

The present study investigated how attentional selection and monetary incentives influence social and emotional judgment on unfamiliar faces and scenes. Attentional selection was modulated with a Go/No-Go task. A transparent color cue was superimposed on the face or scene stimuli. The participants responded when the Go cue appeared and inhibited their responses when the No-Go cue appeared. In the following evaluation task, the participants evaluated the trustworthiness of faces and the beauty of scenes. When monetary incentives were absent, no evaluation bias was observed on the Go trials. Only on the No-Go trials, the participants evaluated the uncued face more trustworthy than the cued one. When monetary incentives were given, however, evaluation bias was observed on both the Go and No-Go trials. On the Go trials, the uncued faces were evaluated less trustworthy and the uncued scenes were evaluated less beautiful. In addition, the participants evaluated the uncued face more trustworthy on the No-Go trials. An additional experiment confirmed that these results were due to attentional enhancement by monetary incentives. These results suggest that evaluation of stimuli can be biased by attention and that monetary incentives can strengthen attentional effects on social and emotional judgment.