The celebrity effect on gaze following in older and young adults

Abstract

Background: In daily life, people often follow others’ gaze direction to infer their attention and mental state. This phenomenon is known as gaze following. Objective: This study aimed to explore whether gaze following in different age groups is influenced by celebrity identity. Methods: We recruited 70 participants, including 35 older adults and 35 young adults. The experimental materials consisted of three faces with different identity information (a political leader, a movie star, and an ordinary person). Each face had left and right gaze conditions. Targets and cues were presented with both longer and shorter stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) conditions. Results: Both older adults and young adults exhibited similar gaze following behaviors. Importantly, the celebrity effect on gaze following was observed in both groups, with stronger effects induced by the leader’s and star’s gazes compared to the ordinary person’s gaze. Older adults showed a larger facilitation effect under the longer SOA condition compared to the shorter SOA, while no such SOA-related facilitation effect was found for young adults. Conclusion: These findings suggest that older adults can integrate social information from others’ faces (celebrity identity) into the process of gaze following as effectively as young adults.