Can Changes in Eye Movement Scanning Alter the Age-Related Deficit in Recognition Memory?

Abstract

Older adults typically exhibit poorer face recognition compared to younger adults. These recognition differences may be due to underlying age-related changes in eye movement scanning. We examined whether older adults’ recognition could be improved by yoking their eye movements to those of younger adults. Participants studied younger and older faces, under free viewing conditions (bases), through a gaze-contingent moving window (own), or a moving window which replayed the eye movements of a base participant (yoked). During the recognition test, participants freely viewed the faces with no viewing restrictions. Own-age recognition biases were observed for older adults in all viewing conditions, suggesting that this effect occurs independently of scanning. Participants in the bases condition had the highest recognition accuracy, and participants in the yoked condition were more accurate than participants in the own condition. Among yoked participants, recognition did not depend on age of the base participant. These results suggest that successful encoding for all participants requires the bottom-up contribution of peripheral information, regardless of the locus of control of the viewer. Although altering the pattern of eye movements did not increase recognition, the amount of sampling of the face during encoding predicted subsequent recognition accuracy for all participants. Increased sampling may confer some advantages for subsequent recognition, particularly for people who have declining memory abilities.

The intersection between the oculomotor and hippocampal memory systems: empirical developments and clinical implications

“…Such repetition-related decreases in neural activity (i.e., repetition suppression) have been taken as a proxy for memory formation; thus, visual exploration was related to the development of lasting representations. 96 These findings extended prior eye-tracking research, which showed that an increase in visual exploration predicts later memory 97,98 by suggesting that the underlying mechanism for such memory benefits is an increase in hippocampal activity. The relationship between gaze fixations and hippocampal activity during perceptual processing (encoding) may simply reflect the amount of visual information that is extracted and, subsequently, bound into a memory representation by the hippocampus.…”

“…Such repetition‐related decreases in neural activity (i.e., repetition suppression) have been taken as a proxy for memory formation; thus, visual exploration was related to the development of lasting representations . These findings extended prior eye‐tracking research, which showed that an increase in visual exploration predicts later memory by suggesting that the underlying mechanism for such memory benefits is an increase in hippocampal activity.…”

“…Older adults often display increased visual sampling behavior (i.e., number of gaze fixations and number of regions sampled) compared with younger adults, as well as increased rehearsal of visual information through their eye movements . The number or pattern of gaze fixations has been shown to be predictive of subsequent recognition, and restricting visual exploration during encoding can hinder subsequent memory . Further research is needed to fully characterize the causal relationship between visual exploration and hippocampal dysfunction.…”

Contributions of attention and elaboration to associative encoding in young and older adults

“…Therefore, if alternations of attention allocation directly serve binding, or they are a consequence of processing relational information, fixation patterns may correlate with the number of encoded features or relations. Indeed, for young adults the number of fixations during the study of scenes (Loftus, 1972) or objects (Kafkas and Montaldi, 2011), and the number of eye gaze transitions between the features of a to-be-encoded face (Chan et al, 2011;Sekiguchi, 2011), predict retrieval on a subsequent recognition test. According to the same logic, we hypothesized that during associative encoding of discrete items, eye gaze transitions between the two items are indicative of the generation of relational links between them.…”

A Closer Look at the Hippocampus and Memory

“…Age-related differences in viewing patterns are robust and predict memory performance [72] [12]. The extent to which these viewing changes contribute to memory and hippocampal activity in older adults is unknown.…”