Adult aging and social attention: the role of cognitive decline and social motivation.

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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, all of the studies of adult age differences in gaze following have used decontextualized pictures of unfamiliar faces. Here we will use innovative eye-tracking technology to test the extent of age differences in attention to gaze in complex social scenes and real interpersonal interactions. Also we will explore the relationship between gaze following in a range of different tasks and measures of broader social functioning in older adults. Aims: The research has three main aims: 1) To test the role of cognitive and motivational mechanisms in age differences in following eye gaze, using novel manipulations of experimental paradigms. 2) To explore how older adults' differential use of gaze cues extend to the processing of more complex social scenes and influence real social interactions with both familiar others and strangers. 3) To establish whether gaze following is related to everyday social functioning and communication skills in older adults. These aims will be achieved by harnessing the applicants' complementary expertise in aging, visual attention, and social cognition to develop novel paradigms using eye-tracking technology to understand social attention in interpersonal interactions.Applications/benefits: We will develop a new model of how aging influences the way in which we attend to other people, and how this relates to social functioning more broadly. The project will also increase understanding of the pattern of younger adults' social attention to older adults, and thus improve models of intergeneration communication. Understanding more about how younger and older people interact is important in developing interventions to improve intergenerational relationships, helping isolated older people improve social interaction skills, and in the longer term to address issues surrounding social isolation. This project will also increase theoretical understanding of the nature of gaze following, and how it is influenced by perceptual, cognitive and motivational factors. A key benefit will be a more integrated and multi-dimensional theory of social attention in old age.