title: Specificity of Age-Related Differences in Eye-Gaze Following: Evidence From Social and Nonsocial Stimuli.
abstract: 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.
  
  
  METHODS
  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.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  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.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK. gillian.slessor@abdn.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Gillian
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Slessor
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Padova, Italy.
authors.forename: Cristina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Venturini
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.
authors.forename: Emily J
authors.initials: EJ
authors.lastname: Bonny
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.
authors.forename: Pauline M
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Insch
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Rokaszewicz
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.
authors.forename: Ailbhe N
authors.initials: AN
authors.lastname: Finnerty
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology / Q000523:psychology; D001288:Attention; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009633:Nonverbal Communication / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011930:Reaction Time; D066107:Social Skills; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis
keywords: Aging; Arrows; Attention; Eye-gaze; Orienting.