Study Finds Older Adults, Adolescents Lack Attention in Social Situations

A study published in Nature Human Behaviour found older adults and adolescents are less attentive to social cues in real-world interactions than young adults, reports Yahoo! Style . The investigation is the first ever to study the allocation of social attention during adolescence and whether it diverges from adulthood. The researchers recorded participants in two real-world social interaction situations — a face-to-face dialogue and navigating an environment — using mobile eye-tracking glasses. Adolescents (10-19 years old), young (20-40 years old), and older (60-80 years old) subjects were evaluated. In the first scenario, adolescents and older adults spent less time looking at the experimenter's face during the conversation, and more time concentrating on background, compared to young adults; the second experiment involved adolescents and older adults spending less time looking at people while navigating a busy university campus, compared to young adults. "Focusing less on people and their faces means that adolescents and older adults miss important cues, and this could lead to larger impairments in social interaction," said University of Kent Professor Heather Ferguson.