Investigating age differences in the influence of joint attention on working memory.

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that older adults make limited use of social cues as compared to younger adults. This has been investigated by testing the influence of gaze cues on attentional processes, with findings showing significantly smaller gaze-cuing effects for older than younger adults. Here, we aimed to investigate whether this would also result in age-related differences in the influence of gaze cues on working memory (WM). We therefore tested the effects of gaze cues from realistic human avatars on working memory across two experiments using dynamic head turns and more subtle eye gaze movements. We compared working memory for items looked at by the cue (congruent), looked away from by the cue (incongruent), and items shown when the cue looked down (neutral). Results demonstrated that for both older and younger adults, gaze cues influenced working memory processes, though there were some important differences related to the nature of the cue. When the cue made a dynamic head turn both younger and older adults showed an equivalent effect of gaze on attention. However, when only the eyes moved, while both the younger and older adults showed an effect of gaze on working memory, there appeared to be a difference in how the participants interpreted the neutral cue, with the older adults appearing to interpret the neutral cues in a similar way to the congruent cues. Overall, we provide important evidence that sharing attention benefits cognition across the life span. Public Significance StatementPrevious research has suggested that older adults make limited use of social cues compared to younger adults. However, research to date has been limited, only investigating effects on attention using simplistic social scenarios that lack ecological validity. Here, we investigated for the first time the effect of dynamic gaze cues of realistic human avatars on working memory and observed that both older and younger adults made use of the social cues and appeared to benefit from sharing attention. Interestingly, the interpretation and use of neutral gaze cues appeared to differ between age-groups, warranting further investigation. These findings question standard notions of age-related cognitive decline, adding to our understanding of social factors that may counteract such decline.

Enhancing ecological validity of gaze-cueing stimuli is associated with increased gaze following for older but not younger adults.

“…The results presented here align with, but also meaningfully extend, other recent research in this literature. For instance, Gregory and Kessler (2022) found that older adults show a memory advantage for objects that are looked toward (via both head turns and gaze shifts) relative to those that are looked away from, such that there are eye-gaze-to-item congruency effects on working memory that are equivalent for younger and older adults (Gregory & Kessler, 2022). They suggested that this age-related preservation of function may be due to the higher level of ecological validity used in their task relative to past research but did not directly manipulate the level of ecological validity in their study.…”

Research on social attention in autism and the challenges of the research domain criteria (RDoC) framework

“…It is clearly the case, though, that measures of social attention are a significant part of the reliable operational diagnostic definition of the preschool phenotype of autism (Mundy & Bullen, 2022). Moreover, beyond the preschool period, social attention can also be reliably and validly measured in children, adolescents and adults with typical development and autism (e.g., Bayliss et al, 2013; Freeth et al, 2020; Freeth & Bugembe, 2019; Gregory & Kessler, 2022; Grynszpan et al, 2019; Mundy et al, 2016; Nowell et al, 2020; Oberwelland et al, 2016), as well as among individuals who exhibit the broad autism phenotype (Elsabbagh et al, 2009; Morgan et al, 2023; Nayar et al, 2022; Swanson et al, 2013; Swanson & Siller, 2014; Zhao et al, 2017). Recent research also suggests that social attention measures may be sensitive to sex differences in autism (Charwarska et al, 2016; Harrop et al, 2020).…”

Influences of eye gaze cues on memory and its mechanisms: The function and evolution of social attention

“…Individuals tend to remember the item that is important for their goals (Altmann and Trafton, 2002;Montagrin et al, 2013). For example, although older adults show a decline in the gaze cueing effect, they still utilized gaze cues to facilitate memory encoding (Gregory and Kessler, 2022). In other words, older adults would like to follow the gaze cues to serve a goal-directed process rather than the uninformative cues.…”

“…For example, if researchers used the transcranial electric stimulation (tES) techniques (Živanović et al, 2022) to establish a relationship between the brain region of processing intention information and arrow cues in vWM task, the arrow cues would enhance individuals vWM performance as a manner of gaze cues did? In future studies, researchers should employ cognitive neuroscience techniques (e.g., neuroimaging and brain stimulation) to explore the critical difference between gaze and arrow cues (Gregory and Kessler, 2022), which will help us understand the social nature of gaze cues. Additionally, an interesting direction for the following research is to determine the gaze cues in more real-world surroundings.…”

“…Although adults can use other rich social skills to complete social interactions, relying on gazing cues to guide and conduct social behavior is still the core content across the human lifespan. Recently, researchers found that gaze cues as a special selective attention (Wang et al, 2019), can closely interact with working memory (Nie et al, 2018;Gregory and Kessler, 2022;Lee and Pitt, 2022). Research evidences demonstrated that gaze cues modulate the observers' attentional distribution, and modified their memory capacity, to enhance item discrimination.…”