Age Differences in Gaze Following: Older Adults Follow Gaze More than Younger Adults When free-viewing Scenes

ABSTRACT

Previous research investigated age differences in gaze following with an attentional cueing paradigm where participants view a face with averted gaze, and then respond to a target appearing in a location congruent or incongruent with the gaze cue. However, this paradigm is far removed from the way we use gaze cues in everyday settings. Here we recorded the eye movements of younger and older adults while they freely viewed naturalistic scenes where a person looked at an object or location. Older adults were more likely to fixate and made more fixations to the gazed-at location, compared to younger adults. Our findings suggest that, contrary to what was observed in the traditional gaze-cueing paradigm, in a non-constrained task that uses contextualized stimuli older adults follow gaze as much as or even more than younger adults.

Acknowledgments

We thank Teodor Nikolov, Igne Umbrasaite, Bianca Bianciardi, Sarah Kenny, and Vestina Sciaponaite for assistance with stimuli selection and data collection.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, E. G. F., upon reasonable request.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/0361073X.2022.2156760.

Notes

1. Figure 3 plots the raw time measures for easier visualization, but our analyses were conducted on the log-transformed measures (cf. Analysis section). Please note that the raw data includes the influences of other fixed and random effects in the model on the outcome variable which are accounted for in the model. Therefore, patterns in the raw data may not always correspond to significant (partial) effects in the model. Asterisks indicate significant effects in the model.

2. In our data, first saccade latency was significantly higher for older compared to younger adults (M = 200.81 and 191.31, SD = 92.96 and 166.06, t = 2.88, df = 5676.2, p-value = 0.004045). Older participants also made significantly more fixations than the younger participants (M = 17.58 and 16.04, SD = 2.88 and 3.77, t = 18.473, df = 6311.3, p-value < .001).

3. We calculated the area under the receiver-operator curve – AUC – with the correspondence between salience and fixations providing the hit rate and the correspondence between control locations and salience providing the false alarm rate. Confidence intervals were calculated from 10,000 bootstrapped samples of the data. The AUC for older participants was 0.6858 [95%CI: 0.6858–0.6859] whereas for younger participants it was 0.6997 [95% CI: 0.6997–0.6997].

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Grant RG14082 from the Economic and Social Research Council, awarded to Louise H. Phillips, Benjamin W. Tatler and Julie Henry.