Some economic transactions require people to trust strangers, whose trustworthiness is unknown. In these circumstances, behavioral studies have shown that adults (but not young adolescents) seem to have some minimal ability to detect the trustworthiness of adult strangers based on their facial features. In this study, we explored the neural correlates of this facial trustworthiness detection. A group of adolescents and adults played a series of economic Trust Games with adult trustees of which we had previously recorded the strategy. Results showed that when adult investors were looking at the picture of a trust-abusing trustee, the left amygdala was relatively more activated than when they were looking at a trust-honoring player. Younger adolescents did not show this pattern and responded with a more pronounced deactivation when facing a trust-abusing trustee. An exploratory whole-brain analysis detected a similar age shift for mentalizing regions of the brain. Our results fit with an emerging model suggesting that the amygdala is implicated in an associative learning process that progressively refines a mapping of faces onto trustworthy behavior and may result in avoiding to be exploited by untrustworthy strangers.

中文翻译：

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经济互动中面部可信度检测的年龄相关神经相关性。

一些经济交易需要人们信任陌生人，而陌生人的可信度是未知的。在这些情况下，行为研究表明，成年人（但不是青少年）似乎没有什么能力根据他们的面部特征来检测成年陌生人的可信度。在这项研究中，我们探索了这种面部可信度检测的神经相关性。一群青少年和成年人与我们之前记录的成年受托人玩了一系列经济信任游戏。结果表明，当成年投资者看一个滥用信任的受托人的照片时，左杏仁核比他们看一个尊重信任的人时更活跃。年轻的青少年没有表现出这种模式，当面对滥用信任的受托人时，他们的反应更为明显。一项探索性全脑分析检测到大脑心理化区域的类似年龄变化。我们的结果与一个新兴模型相吻合，表明杏仁核参与了一个关联学习过程，该过程逐步完善了面部与可信行为的映射，并可能导致避免被不可信的陌生人利用。