Eye movements during perspective-taking in younger and older adults.

Healthy adults can rapidly compute their own and another’s perspective, yet they have difficulties when another person’s point of view conflicts with their own. This study investigated how perspective-taking abilities change across the lifespan using eye-tracking to examine the cognitive mechanisms that underlie visual perspective-taking. Younger (18-30 years-old) and older (65-80 years-old) adults completed a version of Samson et al.’s (2010) visual perspective-taking task. Participants’ behavioural responses were complemented by eye movement analysis. The behavioural responses of the younger adults indicated that they are influenced by what they can see when judging another’s perspective (egocentric intrusions) and influenced by what someone else can see when judging their own perspective (altercentric intrusions), replicating previous findings. However, older adults had specific impairments when there was a conflict between their own and another’s perspective. This pattern was also examined in gaze behaviour and pupillometry analysis. We examined the location of participants’ eye movements around the visual scene. There were distinct fixation patterns for self and other perspective-taking that did not differ between the younger and older age groups. Eye movement analyses indicated that both younger and older adults were using similar processing strategies during visual perspective-taking