Search

Previous research investigated age differences in gaze following with an attentional cueing paradigm where participants view a face with averted gaze, and then respond to a target appearing in a location congruent or incongruent with the gaze cue. However, this paradigm is far removed from the way we use gaze cues in everyday settings. Here we recorded the eye movements of younger and older adults while they freely viewed naturalistic scenes where a person looked at an object or location. Older adults were more likely to fixate and made more fixations to the gazed-at location, compared to younger adults. Our findings suggest that, contrary to what was observed in the traditional gaze-cueing paradigm, in a non-constrained task that uses contextualized stimuli older adults follow gaze as much as or even more than younger adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We use a transmission chain method to establish how context and category salience influence the formation of novel stereotypes through cumulative cultural evolution. We created novel alien targets by combining features from three category dimensions—color, movement, and shape—thereby creating social targets that were individually unique but that also shared category membership with other aliens (e.g., two aliens might be the same color and shape but move differently). At the start of the transmission chains each alien was randomly assigned attributes that described it (e.g., arrogant, caring, confident). Participants were given training on the alien‐attribute assignments and were then tested on their memory for these. The alien‐attribute assignments participants produced during test were used as the training materials for the next participant in the transmission chain. As information was repeatedly transmitted an increasingly simplified, learnable stereotype‐like structure emerged for targets who shared the same color, such that by the end of the chains targets who shared the same color were more likely to share the same attributes (a reanalysis of data from Martin et al., which we term Experiment 1). The apparent bias toward the formation of novel stereotypes around the color category dimension was also found for objects (Experiment 2). However, when the category dimension of color was made less salient, it no longer dominated the formation of novel stereotypes (Experiment 3). The current findings suggest that context and category salience influence category dimension salience, which in turn influences the cumulative cultural evolution of information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trust is a particularly under-studied aspect of social relationships in older age. In the current study, young (n= 35) and older adults (n= 35) completed a series of one-shot social economic trust games in which they invested real money with trustees. There were potential gains with each investment and also a risk of losing everything if the trustee was untrustworthy. The reputation and facial appearance of each trustee were manipulated to make them appear more or less trustworthy. Results revealed that young and older adults invest more money with trustees whose facial appearance and reputation indicate that they are trustworthy rather than untrustworthy. However, older adults were more likely than young to invest with trustees who had a reputation for being untrustworthy. We discuss whether age-related differences in responding to negative information may account for an age-related increase in trust, particularly when trusting someone with a reputation for being uncooperative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both healthy aging and dementia cause problems with emotion perception, and the impairment is generally greater for specific emotions (anger, sadness and fear). Most studies to date have focused on static facial photographs of emotions. The current study investigated the effects of healthy aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD) on the ability to decode emotions from bodily motion displayed by point light stimuli. Response biases were controlled to investigate whether these influenced the specificity of impairment in perceiving individual emotions. Study 1 compared healthy young and older adults, and Study 2 people with AD and age-matched controls, on an emotion perception task using point light stimuli. Accuracy and the pattern of errors were investigated. Specific age-related impairments were found in labeling sadness, anger and fear from point light displays. Response biases were also found, and controlling for these biases indicated that older adults were worse at labeling all emotions. People with AD were less accurate than healthy older controls at labeling fear, anger and sadness. After controlling for response biases, AD caused impairment in perceiving all emotions. These results indicate a general age-related impairment in decoding emotions from bodily motion, and a further impairment in this skill in AD. Apparent specificity of deficits in emotion labeling tasks needs to be interpreted cautiously, and correction for response bias should be considered. Problems perceiving emotion cues from biological motion might impair social interaction in older adults, particularly those with dementia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explored own-age biases in deception detection, investigating whether individuals were more likely to trust those in their own-age group. Younger and older participants were asked to detect deceit from videos of younger and older speakers, rating their confidence in each decision. Older participants showed an own-age bias: they were more likely to think that deceptive speakers of their own age, relative to younger speakers, were telling the truth. Older participants were also more confident in their judgements of own-age, relative to other-age, speakers. There were no own-age biases for younger participants. In a subsequent (apparently unrelated) task, participants were asked to rate the trustworthiness of the speakers. Both age groups of participants trusted younger speakers who had previously told the truth more compared to those who had lied. This effect was not found for older speakers. These findings are considered in relation to the in-group/out-group model of social cognition and common stereotypical beliefs held about younger and older adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From an early age, we show a clear tendency to attend to the locations that we see others attending to. This gaze following response seems to decline as we move into old age, but why this might be is not well understood. At present evidence for reduced gaze following in old age comes mainly from work that does not include measures of eye movements, or that does, but does not use photographic faces as the gaze-cue-providing stimuli (e.g., Kuhn et al., 2015). We recorded eye movements of old and young adults as they completed a gaze cuing paradigm in which we manipulated the time between gaze cue onset and target onset (SOA: 100, 300, 600, 1000 ms) and the type of face stimulus (schematic, photograph of a young face, photograph of an old face). We found more gaze following responses (saccades in the same direction as the gaze cue) in young participants than in old participants. Contrary to previous studies, we found no evidence of an own-age bias in gaze following when participants were presented with photographic stimuli. Crucially, however, gaze cueing was larger for older participants, when they were presented schematic relative to photographic faces. These findings are consistent with the suggestion that decline in gaze following in old age might arise from perceptual decline, with preserved gaze following only for the schematic faces, which provide more perceptually salient and easy to discriminate cues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is abundant evidence that emotion categorization is influenced by the social category membership of target faces, with target sex and target race modulating the ease with which perceivers can categorize happy and angry emotional expressions. However, theoretical interpretation of these findings is constrained by gender and race imbalances in both the participant samples and target faces typically used when demonstrating these effects (e.g., most participants have been White women and most Black targets have been men). Across seven experiments, the current research used gender-matched samples (Experiments 1a and 1b), gender- and racial identity-matched samples (Experiments 2a and 2b), and manipulations of social context (Experiments 3a, 3b, and 4) to establish whether emotion categorization is influenced by interactions between the social category membership of perceivers and target faces. Supporting this idea, we found the presence and size of the happy face advantage were influenced by interactions between perceivers and target social categories, with reliable happy face advantages in reaction times for ingroup targets but not necessarily for outgroup targets. White targets and female targets were the only categories associated with a reliable happy face advantage that was independent of perceiver category. The interactions between perceiver and target social category were eliminated when targets were blocked by social category (e.g., a block of all White female targets; Experiments 3a and 3b) and accentuated when targets were associated with additional category information (i.e., ingroup/outgroup nationality; Experiment 4). These findings support the possibility that contextually sensitive intergroup processes influence emotion categorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore whether societal gender stereotypes re-emerge as social information is repeatedly passed from person to person. We examined whether peoples' memories of personality attributes associated with female and male social targets became increasingly consistent with societal gender stereotypes as information was passed down social transmission chains. After passing through the memories of just four generations of participants, our initially gender-balanced micro-societies became rife with traditional gender stereotypes. While we found some evidence of the re-emergence of gender stereotypes in Experiment 1, we found the effects were stronger when targets appeared in a feminine-stereotyped occupational context (Experiment 2), and a masculine-stereotyped occupational context (Experiment 3); conversely, the re-emergence of gender stereotypes was attenuated when targets appeared in a single gender context (Experiment 4). The current findings demonstrate that gender schematic memory bias, if widely shared, might cause gender stereotypes to be maintained through cultural evolution., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.