Altered automatic gaze processing in older adults

From understanding others' mental states to interpreting social cues, aging impairs social abilities. These impairments might not seem surprising given they rely on other cognitive functions such as memory, attention and decision-making, which are known to decline with age. It is, however, unclear to what degree impairments of more basic perceptual abilities, such as eye-gaze detection, contribute to or even precede the decline in social skills. Previous studies have obtained mixed results when investigating whether aging impairs fundamental perceptual processing of social information. Our study expands on previous findings by showing that aging impairs the ability to rapidly detect and discriminate gaze direction. Using breaking Continuous Flash Suppression (b-CFS), we tested whether preconscious automatic processing of direct eye contact was prioritized over the processing of averted gaze direction, as previously established in younger adults. Our results show that, on average, older adults (65-89 years old, n = 19) lack this direct gaze advantage and do not exhibit significant differences in detecting direct vs. averted gaze direction. These results provide important insights into age-related deficits in social cognition, suggesting social processing deficits may manifest at the earliest automatic stages of perceptual processing. Future work examining the relationship between alterations in gaze processing and decline in higher-level cognitive functions could inform the development of early detection tools and clinical interventions.