Koenig-Robert Roger, Barrientos Boris, Bailey Phoebe E, Seymour Kiley
Faculty of Health, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
School of Psychology, The University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW, Australia.
Front Aging Neurosci. 2025 Jul 8;17:1592763. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2025.1592763. eCollection 2025.
From understanding others' mental states to interpreting social cues, aging impairs social abilities. These impairments might not seem surprising given they rely on other cognitive functions such as memory, attention and decision-making, which are known to decline with age. It is, however, unclear to what degree impairments of more basic perceptual abilities, such as eye-gaze detection, contribute to or even precede the decline in social skills. Previous studies have obtained mixed results when investigating whether aging impairs fundamental perceptual processing of social information. Our study expands on previous findings by showing that aging impairs the ability to rapidly detect and discriminate gaze direction. Using breaking Continuous Flash Suppression (b-CFS), we tested whether preconscious automatic processing of direct eye contact was prioritized over the processing of averted gaze direction, as previously established in younger adults. Our results show that, on average, older adults (65-89 years old, = 19) lack this direct gaze advantage and do not exhibit significant differences in detecting direct vs. averted gaze direction. These results provide important insights into age-related deficits in social cognition, suggesting social processing deficits may manifest at the earliest automatic stages of perceptual processing. Future work examining the relationship between alterations in gaze processing and decline in higher-level cognitive functions could inform the development of early detection tools and clinical interventions.
从理解他人的心理状态到解读社交线索，衰老会损害社交能力。鉴于这些能力依赖于其他认知功能，如记忆、注意力和决策能力，而这些能力已知会随着年龄增长而衰退，所以这些损害可能并不令人惊讶。然而，目前尚不清楚更基本的感知能力，如目光检测能力的损害在多大程度上导致社交技能的下降，甚至是否先于社交技能的下降。以往研究在调查衰老是否会损害对社交信息的基本感知处理时，结果不一。我们的研究扩展了以往的发现，表明衰老会损害快速检测和辨别目光方向的能力。我们使用间断连续闪烁抑制（b-CFS）测试了，如先前在年轻人中所证实的那样，对直接目光接触的前意识自动处理是否优先于对回避目光方向的处理。我们的结果表明，平均而言，老年人（65 - 89岁，n = 19）缺乏这种直接目光优势，并且在检测直接目光与回避目光方向上没有表现出显著差异。这些结果为与年龄相关的社会认知缺陷提供了重要见解，表明社交处理缺陷可能在感知处理的最早自动阶段就已显现。未来研究目光处理变化与高级认知功能衰退之间关系的工作，可能会为早期检测工具和临床干预措施的开发提供信息。
