Study title

These data sets present behavioural and eye-tracking data from five experiments looking at the effects of adult aging on gaze cueing. Experiment 1 looked at age differences in gaze cueing when varying face type (schematic, young, old) and stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA: 100ms, 300ms, 600ms, 1000ms). Experiment 2 investigated age differences in gaze cueing when varying familiarity of the face. In experiment 3 we looked at the effects of a dual task load on age differences in gaze cueing. These three experiments used a traditional gaze cueing paradigm. The final two studies looked at gaze cueing in realistic scenes. Experiment 4 evaluated age differences in using gaze cues in a real scene during a search task, while Experiment 5 looked at naturalistic gaze behaviour while free-viewing complex social scenes.Context: Social isolation is one of the most prevalent problems for older adults, but we know relatively little about age differences in social communication skills likely to be important in initiating and maintaining relationships. The current project will focus on one particular aspect of social communication: why do older people engage less in mutual gaze than younger people? Older adults are less likely than young to attend to, and follow the eye gaze direction of, other people. This is likely to be important, because attending to another's gaze is an informative social cue which facilitates joint understanding and communication. There are two opposing theoretical explanations for age differences in gaze following. First, older adults may follow gaze less than young because of declining perceptual and cognitive processes. Second, older adults may show less gaze following because the typical paradigms used in experimental studies to date are not socially motivating for them. We will use novel experimental manipulations to test the role of the perceptual, cognitive and motivational mechanisms underlying age difference in attention to others' eye gaze. To date,...