Specificity of Age-Related Differences in Eye-Gaze Following: Evidence From Social and Nonsocial Stimuli.

BACKGROUND: Eye-gaze following is a fundamental social skill, facilitating communication. The present series of studies explored adult age-related differences in this key social-cognitive ability. METHOD: In Study 1 younger and older adult participants completed a cueing task in which eye-gaze cues were predictive or non-predictive of target location. Another eye-gaze cueing task, assessing the influence of congruent and incongruent eye-gaze cues relative to trials which provided no cue to target location, was administered in Study 2. Finally, in Study 3 the eye-gaze cue was replaced by an arrow. RESULTS: In Study 1 older adults showed less evidence of gaze following than younger participants when required to strategically follow predictive eye-gaze cues and when making automatic shifts of attention to non-predictive eye-gaze cues. Findings from Study 2 suggested that, unlike younger adults, older participants showed no facilitation effect and thus did not follow congruent eye-gaze cues. They also had significantly weaker attentional costs than their younger counterparts. These age-related differences were not found in the non-social arrow cueing task. DISCUSSION: Taken together these findings suggest older adults do not use eye-gaze cues to engage in joint attention, and have specific social difficulties decoding critical information from the eye region.

Investigating the "deceiver stereotype": do older adults associate averted gaze with deception?

OBJECTIVES: Research indicates that the most commonly held belief about deception is that people avert their gaze when lying. The present study assessed adult age-related differences in both the association between averted gaze and judgments of deception and the strength of the "deceiver stereotype." METHOD: In Study 1, younger and older adult participants were required to decide if individuals displaying direct gaze or differing degrees of gaze aversion were lying or telling the truth. In Study 2, a group of younger and older adults were explicitly asked about their beliefs concerning how different behaviors related to deception. RESULTS: Findings revealed that, compared with younger participants, when asked to decide whether individuals were lying, older adults were less likely to associate direct gaze with honesty and averted gaze with deception. This effect was not due to age-related differences in the strength of the deceiver stereotype, as when explicitly asked, both younger and older participants associated averted gaze with lying. DISCUSSION: These findings provide further evidence of age-related differences in the ability to extract socially relevant information from the eye region, which might relate to changes in visual scanning of facial features with age.