Specificity of Age-Related Differences in Eye-Gaze Following: Evidence From Social and Nonsocial Stimuli
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Gillian Slessor1, Cristina Venturini2, Emily J Bonny3
1School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK. gillian.slessor@abdn.ac.uk.
Background:
Eye-gaze following is a fundamental social skill, facilitating communication. The present series of studies explored adult age-related differences in this key social-cognitive ability.
Method:
In Study 1 younger and older adult participants completed a cueing task in which eye-gaze cues were predictive or non-predictive of target location. Another eye-gaze cueing task, assessing the influence of congruent and incongruent eye-gaze cues relative to trials which provided no cue to target location, was administered in Study 2. Finally, in Study 3 the eye-gaze cue was replaced by an arrow.
Results:
In Study 1 older adults showed less evidence of gaze following than younger participants when required to strategically follow predictive eye-gaze cues and when making automatic shifts of attention to non-predictive eye-gaze cues. Findings from Study 2 suggested that, unlike younger adults, older participants showed no facilitation effect and thus did not follow congruent eye-gaze cues. They also had significantly weaker attentional costs than their younger counterparts. These age-related differences were not found in the non-social arrow cueing task.
Discussion:
Taken together these findings suggest older adults do not use eye-gaze cues to engage in joint attention, and have specific social difficulties decoding critical information from the eye region.
