TY - JOUR
T1 - Tracking developmental differences in real-world social attention across adolescence, young adulthood and older adulthood
AU - De Lillo, Martina
AU - Foley, Rebecca
AU - Fysh, Matthew C.
AU - Stimson, Aimée
AU - Bradford, Elisabeth E. F.
AU - Woodrow-Hill, Camilla
AU - Ferguson, Heather J.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was carried out with the support of a European Research Council grant to H.J.F. (CogSoCoAGE; 636458). The preregistration, datasets and code supporting this Article are available at the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/fnd8h/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
PY - 2021/10
Y1 - 2021/10
N2 - Detecting and responding appropriately to social information in one's environment is a vital part of everyday social interactions. Here, we report two preregistered experiments that examine how social attention develops across the lifespan, comparing adolescents (10-19 years old), young (20-40 years old) and older (60-80 years old) adults. In two real-world tasks, participants were immersed in different social interaction situations-a face-to-face conversation and navigating an environment-and their attention to social and non-social content was recorded using eye-tracking glasses. The results revealed that, compared with young adults, adolescents and older adults attended less to social information (that is, the face) during face-to-face conversation, and to people when navigating the real world. Thus, we provide evidence that real-world social attention undergoes age-related change, and these developmental differences might be a key mechanism that influences theory of mind among adolescents and older adults, with potential implications for predicting successful social interactions in daily life.
AB - Detecting and responding appropriately to social information in one's environment is a vital part of everyday social interactions. Here, we report two preregistered experiments that examine how social attention develops across the lifespan, comparing adolescents (10-19 years old), young (20-40 years old) and older (60-80 years old) adults. In two real-world tasks, participants were immersed in different social interaction situations-a face-to-face conversation and navigating an environment-and their attention to social and non-social content was recorded using eye-tracking glasses. The results revealed that, compared with young adults, adolescents and older adults attended less to social information (that is, the face) during face-to-face conversation, and to people when navigating the real world. Thus, we provide evidence that real-world social attention undergoes age-related change, and these developmental differences might be a key mechanism that influences theory of mind among adolescents and older adults, with potential implications for predicting successful social interactions in daily life.
KW - Developmental studies
KW - Human behaviour
KW - Psychology
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85105803468&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1038/s41562-021-01113-9
DO - 10.1038/s41562-021-01113-9
M3 - Article
C2 - 33986520
SN - 2397-3374
VL - 5
SP - 1381
EP - 1390
JO - Nature Human Behaviour
JF - Nature Human Behaviour
ER -