Attention to direct gaze in young and older adulthood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Using cueing tasks, young and older adults’ attention to direct gaze was assessed. • Reflexive orienting to non-predictive direct gaze did not occur in either age group. • Voluntary orienting to predictive direct gaze occurred in both age groups but was reduced among older adults. • Voluntary orienting was unique to direct gaze. It did not occur for averted gaze or a nonsocial cue. Attention to others’ direct gaze supports many social-cognitive processes (e.g., emotion recognition, joint attention) that are known to decline with age, but it remains to be established whether attention to direct gaze itself is associated with age-related changes. We address this question across two studies. In Study 1, young ( n = 42) and older ( n = 45) adults completed response time tasks with non-predictive direct gaze cues and predictive direct gaze cues, designed to index reflexive and volitional covert attentional orienting to direct gaze, respectively. The results showed that young and older adults equivalently shifted their attention to predictive direct gaze cues but did not shift their attention to non-predictive direct gaze cues. Study 2 was designed to assess whether this orienting to predictive direct gaze was unique to direct gaze. A separate independent sample of young ( n = 43) and older ( n = 44) adults completed response time tasks with predictive direct gaze cues, predictive averted gaze cues, and predictive non-social (line orientation) cues. Attention was shifted to direct gaze but neither averted gaze nor line orientation, suggesting direct gaze was unique in being voluntarily attended-to. Pooling the predictive direct gaze task data across Studies 1 and 2, we found that young and older adults both oriented to the direct gaze cues, but that this orienting effect was reduced among older adults. The findings presented here provide novel insights into how direct gaze cues uniquely capture attention in younger and older age, and show for the first time that voluntary orienting to direct gaze is reduced in older adults. Theoretical implications are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".