Age-related decline in the reflexive component of overt gaze following

Abstract

Abstract:Previous research has found age-related declines in social perception tasks as well as the ability to engage in joint attention, and orienting covert attention (i.e. absence of eye movements) in response to an eye gaze cue. We used an overt gaze following task to explore age differences in overt gaze following whilst people searched for a target. Participants were faster to detect targets appearing at the looked at location, and although the gaze cue biased the direction in which saccades were executed, no age differences were found in overt gaze following.There were however, age effects relating to involuntary eye movements. In the younger adults, anticipatory saccades were biased in the direction of the gaze cue, but this bias was not observed in the older group. Moreover, in the younger adults, saccades that followed the gaze were initiated more rapidly, illustrating the reflexive nature of gaze following. No such difference was observed in the older adults. Importantly, our results showed that whilst the general levels of gaze following were age-invariant, there were age-related differences in the reflexive components of overt gaze following.

Tolerant Barbary macaques maintain juvenile levels of social attention in old age, but despotic rhesus macaques do not

“…For example, co-orienting is an important cognitive component for establishing joint attention with others (Butterworth & Cochran, 1980; Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello, 1998), communicative and linguistic development (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2005, 2008; Csibra, 2010; Senju & Csibra, 2008) and perspective taking and theory of mind more generally (Charman et al, 2000; Flom et al, 2007; Moll & Tomasello, 2004, 2006; Wellman, 2011). Furthermore, older adult humans show a decline in their propensity to respond to gaze cues (Kuhn, Pagano, Maani, & Bunce, 2015; Slessor, Phillips, & Bull, 2008; Slessor et al, 2014) as well as impairments in more complex theory of mind skills such as perspective taking and false-belief attribution (Moran, 2013; Phillips et al, 2011; Slessor, Phillips, & Bull, 1007). Given that gaze is such a potent source of information into other minds, it is possible that the reduced sensitivity to gaze cues that we found in older rhesus monkeys may feed forward and lead to relative decrements in other aspects of their social cognition as well.…”

Eye contact boosts the reflexive component of overt gaze following

“…Correct saccades with a latency smaller than 80 ms or greater than 800 ms were considered outliers and discarded from the analyses (0.6% of trials). Inspired by previous studies 33,46,47 , a host of different analyses were carried out in order to explore in detail the potential impact of eye contact on gaze following behaviour.…”

Attention holding elicited by direct-gaze faces is reflected in saccadic peak velocity

“…When target location corresponds to that indicated by eye-gaze direction, a benefit in performance is generally reported, such as smaller response latencies and a greater accuracy (e.g., Driver et al 1999;Friesen and Kingstone 1998;Kuhn and Benson 2007;Ricciardelli et al 2002). Intriguingly, this form of social attention can be deeply shaped by many different social variables that characterize both the cueing face and the participant, such as emotional expressions (e.g., Bayliss et al 2010), age (e.g., Kuhn et al 2015), social status (e.g., Dalmaso et al 2012), social evaluation (Carraro et al 2017), racial group membership (e.g., Pavan et al 2011), and even political affiliation (e.g., Carraro et al 2015;Dodd et al 2011;Porciello et al 2016).…”

“…Inspired by study, the present work was carried out with the main aim to systematically investigate the impact of direct-gaze pictorial faces on saccadic eye movements. To this end, a modified version of the task devised by was employed by presenting, on each trial, one single central pictorial face of real individuals and peripheral targets, in line with the vast majority of overt orienting studies concerning eye-gaze direction (e.g., Ciardo et al 2014;Dalmaso et al 2015;Kuhn et al 2015;Porciello et al 2016;Ricciardelli et al 2002). In Experiment 1, participants were asked to make a saccade towards a peripheral target that could appear either rightwards or leftwards with respect to the centre of the screen.…”