P2-22: Aging Effects on the Visual Scanning of Emotional Faces

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of aging on the accuracy of response, reaction time, and visual scanning strategy, while emotional faces were viewed. Forty-three neurologically healthy participants were assigned to either a young, middle, or older-aged group. Overall, older adults were significantly less accurate in recognising facial expressions, especially those demonstrating negative emotions. Further, the young and middle-aged adults took significantly less time to recognise an emotional face than the older adults. When assessing eye movements, it was noted that the older group generated a significantly greater number of fixations to the faces and spent more time overall in looking at the various facial features. Regardless of the emotional expression and participant age, all participants looked more frequently and for longer at the eye region; this was then followed by the nose and then mouth. The findings from this work support the existence of an age-related decline in emotion recognition. However, this study is the first to document reaction time differences in identifying facial affect across three different age groups. The eyes are the most important facial feature when identifying an emotional face, and this holds true across the age ranges investigated in this work. In essence, when looking at emotional faces, middle and older-aged adults demonstrate a similar scanning pattern compared to their younger counterparts–they just take longer to do so. Therefore, the normal age-related decline in recognising facial affect appears not due to impairment in the way the eyes move to look at faces.