A Comparative Study Recognizing the Expression of Information Between Elderly Individuals and Young Individuals

Background: Studies have shown that elderly individuals have significantly worse facial expression recognition scores than young adults. Some have suggested that this difference is due to perceptual degradation, while others suggest it is due to decreased attention of elderly individuals to the most informative regions of the face.
Methods: To resolve this controversy, this study recruited 85 participants and used a behavioral task and eye-tracking techniques (EyeLink 1000 Plus eye tracker). It adopted the “study-recognition” paradigm, and a mixed experimental design of 3 (facial expressions: positive, neutral, negative) × 2 (subjects’ age: young, old) × 3 (facial areas of interest: eyes, nose, and mouth) was used to explore whether there was perceptual degradation in older people’s attention to facial expressions and investigate the differences in diagnostic areas between young and older people.
Results: The behavioral results revealed that young participants had significantly higher facial expression recognition scores than older participants did; moreover, the eye-tracking results revealed that younger people generally fixated on faces significantly more than elderly people, demonstrating the perceptual degradation in elderly people. Young people primarily look at the eyes, followed by the nose and, finally, the mouth when examining facial expressions. The elderly participants primarily focus on the eyes, followed by the mouth and then the nose.
Conclusion: The findings confirmed that young participants have better facial expression recognition performance than elderly participants, which may be related more to perceptual degradation than to decreased attention to informative areas of the face. For elderly people, the duration of gaze toward the facial diagnosis area (such as the eyes) should be increased when recognizing faces to compensate for the disadvantage of decreased facial recognition performance caused by perceptual aging.