Pupil Size Changes Influence Lasting Person Perceptions

Pupil size changes represent a subtle social cue, often processed outside of conscious awareness. Despite this subtlety, changes in pupil size affect our perceptions of the character and emotions of others. In a series experiments we demonstrated for the first time that pupil size changes are also encoded into long-term memory. In the experiments participants were exposed 51 Poster abstracts to faces whose pupils dilated or constricted. In a subsequent task they were asked to judge the faces for friendliness and interest. Importantly, at this later stage all the faces displayed pupils of the same size. Despite not noticing the pupil size changes in the previous task, participants’ ratings were influenced by whether a face had displayed dilated or constricted pupils. This effect interacted with the gender and trustworthiness of the facial stimuli, and affected participants differently if they had been primed to feel socially excluded. Extending this last finding we present unpublished data examining the influence of loneliness on pupil-memory effects. We found participants who were high in loneliness demonstrated a lack of sensitivity to pupil size changes. Conversely those who were less lonely showed the predicted pu