Gaze patterns to emotional faces throughout the adult lifespan

Prior research indicates that there may be age-related differences in visual attention to emotional faces, and that this might contribute to older adults' difficulties perceiving emotional facial displays. However, the nature and magnitude of age differences in gaze patterns have been inconsistent. Study 1 therefore used meta-analytic methodology to quantify age effects in gazing to the eyes and mouths of faces in standard emotion perception tasks. The results showed that older adults displayed a moderate bias to look less at the eyes compared to younger adults (g = -.66), and a small bias to look more at the mouth (g = .32). However, for gazing at the eyes, the largest age effects were evident in response to emotionally neutral faces, suggesting that these visual biases reflect broader age-related differences in face processing, and not differences in how emotions specifically are processed. Also consistent with this possibility was the absence of any association between gaze patterns and emotion perception accuracy. Study 2 then provided the first empirical test of age-related differences in gaze patterns using a sample of young, middle-aged, and older adults. Again, older adults looked less at the eyes compared to younger adults. However, of particular interest was the finding that these visual biases appear to represent a linear decline. As with Study 1, no relationships emerged between emotion perception accuracy and gaze patterns. Together, these findings show that aging is associated with visual biases to facial stimuli that are unrelated to older adults' ability to perceive emotional displays. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).