Age effects and gaze patterns in recognising emotional expressions: An in-depth look at gaze measures and covariates

The present study investigated predictors of age effects in emotion recognition accuracy. Older and younger adults were tested on a battery of cognitive, vision, and affective questionnaires; participants' eyes were also tracked while they completed an emotion recognition task. Older adults were worse at recognising sad, angry, and fearful expressions than younger adults. When controlling for covariates related to emotion recognition accuracy, younger adults still outperformed older adults in recognising anger and sadness. Younger adults tended to pay more attention to the eyes than older adults. Results suggest that age-related gaze patterns in emotion recognition may depend on the specific emotion being recognised and may not generalise across stimuli sets.