Attention to direct gaze in young and older adulthood

Attention to others' direct gaze supports many social-cognitive processes (e.g., emotion recognition, joint attention) that are known to decline with age, but it remains to be established whether attention to direct gaze itself is associated with age-related changes. We address this question across two studies. In Study 1, young (n = 42) and older (n = 45) adults completed response time tasks with non-predictive direct gaze cues and predictive direct gaze cues, designed to index reflexive and volitional covert attentional orienting to direct gaze, respectively. The results showed that young and older adults equivalently shifted their attention to predictive direct gaze cues but did not shift their attention to non-predictive direct gaze cues. Study 2 was designed to assess whether this orienting to predictive direct gaze was unique to direct gaze. A separate independent sample of young (n = 43) and older (n = 44) adults completed response time tasks with predictive direct gaze cues, predictive averted gaze cues, and predictive non-social (line orientation) cues. Attention was shifted to direct gaze but neither averted gaze nor line orientation, suggesting direct gaze was unique in being voluntarily attended-to. Pooling the predictive direct gaze task data across Studies 1 and 2, we found that young and older adults both oriented to the direct gaze cues, but that this orienting effect was reduced among older adults. The findings presented here provide novel insights into how direct gaze cues uniquely capture attention in younger and older age, and show for the first time that voluntary orienting to direct gaze is reduced in older adults. Theoretical implications are discussed.