Looking the same, but remembering differently: Preserved eye-movement synchrony with age during movie-watching

Abstract

Naturalistic stimuli (e.g., movies) provide the opportunity to study lifelike experiences in the lab. While young adults respond to these stimuli in a highly synchronized manner (as indexed by intersubject correlations [ISC] in their neural activity), older adults respond more idiosyncratically. Here, we examine whether eye movement synchrony (eye-ISC) also declines with age during movie-watching and whether it relates to memory for the movie. Our results show no age-related decline in eye-ISC, suggesting that age differences in neural ISC are not caused by differences in viewing patterns. Both age groups recalled the same number of episodic details from the movie, however, older adults recalled more semantic and false information. In both age groups, more recall of false information related to lower eye-ISC. Finally, older adults showed better cued-recall than younger adults across event boundaries, suggesting that older adults may form broader associations across events when encoding everyday experiences.

Knowledge guides attention to goal-relevant information in older adults

“…For example, films have motion, which captures attention (Abrams & Christ, 2003;Mital et al, 2010), but static scenes and texts do not. In addition, highly produced films, like the ones used in previous studies that found evidence of the Tyranny of Film (Davis et al, 2021;Hutson et al, 2017;Loschky et al, 2015), may contain film-specific features such as cuts, close-ups, and foregrounding of objects in the center of the screen, that exert strong bottom-up control on eye movements (Dorr et al, 2010;Loschky et al, 2015;Smith, 2012;Tatler, 2007). Thus, the Tyranny of Film may be due to unique characteristics present in Hollywood films.…”

“…To simulate real world experiences in the current experiment, we used short films of naturalistic activities that excluded many of the standard film editing techniques present in Hollywood style films. Thus, we hypothesized that the videos in the current study may afford a stronger influence of top-down processing on attention than what has been used in previous work (Hutson et al, 2017;Loschky et al, 2015;Huff et al, 2017;Davis et al, 2021). Further, evidence of the Tyranny of Film has exclusively come from studies with young participants (see however, Davis et al, 2021).…”

“…Thus, we hypothesized that the videos in the current study may afford a stronger influence of top-down processing on attention than what has been used in previous work (Hutson et al, 2017;Loschky et al, 2015;Huff et al, 2017;Davis et al, 2021). Further, evidence of the Tyranny of Film has exclusively come from studies with young participants (see however, Davis et al, 2021). It is possible that the event model may be more influential on older adults' eye movements due to age-related declines in perception, attention, and memory as we will outline in the next section.…”

“…Contrary to claims generated from SPECT, context manipulations, which show strong differences in viewers' understanding of a film, fail to influence where and for how long viewers look. This effect has been called the Tyranny of Film, because viewers fixate many of the same places at the same time when watching a Hollywood film, despite having large differences in comprehension and memory of the clip (Davis et al, 2021;Hutson et al, 2017;Loschky et al, 2015;Smith & Mital, 2013). For instance, Hutson et al, (2017) manipulated viewers' comprehension of a film by showing one group of participants a video of someone placing a bomb into a car trunk, before a couple, who did not know about the bomb, got into the car and drove away.…”

“…A variety of different studies have now found support for this lack of a mandatory top-down effect on eye movements in film (fandom, Huff et al, 2017; opinions about abortion, Hutson, 2018; tennis expertise, Taya et al, 2013). Further, Davis et al (2021) found no age-related differences in gaze patterns between older and young adults despite significant differences in memory for a film (Davis et al, 2021). As such, bottom-up mechanisms, driven by motion signals, may play a dominant role in controlling where people attend, regardless of one's understanding of a video (Hutson et al, 2017;Loschky et al, 2015;Mital et al, 2010).…”