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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | Experimental Aging Research |
| Early online date | 26 Dec 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 26 Dec 2022 |
Bibliographical note
AcknowledgementsWe thank Teodor Nikolov, Igne Umbrasaite, Bianca Bianciardi, Sarah Kenny, and Vestina Sciaponaite for assistance with stimuli selection and data collection.
Funding details
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
Data Availability Statement
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/0361073X.2022.2156760.Keywords
- gaze following ageing
- eye movements
- social attention
- scene viewing