Using eye movement measures to investigate effects of age on memory for objects in a scene

Abstract

We examined whether there were age-related differences in eye movements during intentional encoding of a photographed scene that might account for age-related differences in memory of objects in the scene. Younger and older adults exhibited similar scan path patterns, and visited each region of interest in the scene with similar frequency and duration. Despite the similarity in viewing, there were fundamental differences in the viewing–memory relationship. Although overall recognition was poorer in the older than younger adults, there was no age effect on recognition probability for objects visited only once. More importantly, re-visits to objects brought gain in recognition probability for the younger adults, but not for the older adults. These results suggest that the age-related differences in object recognition performance are in part due to inefficient integration of information from working memory to longer-term memory.

Keywords:

• Age effect
• Encoding
• Eye movement
• Recognition memory
• Scene perception

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a UK Economic and Social Research Council research grant (RES-000-22-3398).

Notes

¹To index spatial vision ability we computed a composite score, consisting of acuity loss of near and distant vision and thresholds of the four tested spatial frequencies, using the Horst method (Horst, 1936). A composite score is a weighted sum of constituent measures; the weight of a constituent is the column (or row) summation of the table of bivariate correlations of constituent measures divided by the standard deviation of the constituent measure. This method maximises difference between all possible pairs of cases.

²We thank Eyal Reingold for suggesting this possibility.