TY - JOUR
T1 - Tracking developmental differences in real-world social attention across adolescence, young adulthood and older adulthood
AU - Lillo, Martina De
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 - 2021/5/13
Y1 - 2021/5/13
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 - Development
KW - Human behaviour
KW - Psychology
KW - Social attention
U2 - 10.1038/s41562-021-01113-9
DO - 10.1038/s41562-021-01113-9
M3 - Article
SN - 2397-3374
JO - Nature Human Behaviour
JF - Nature Human Behaviour
ER -