Using eye movement measures to investigate effects of age on memory for objects in a scene

We examined whether there were age-related differences in eye movements during intentional encoding of a photographed scene that might account for age-related differences in memory of objects in the scene. Younger and older adults exhibited similar scan path patterns, and visited each region of interest in the scene with similar frequency and duration. Despite the similarity in viewing, there were fundamental differences in the viewing-memory relationship. Although overall recognition was poorer in the older than younger adults, there was no age effect on recognition probability for objects visited only once. More importantly, re-visits to objects brought gain in recognition probability for the younger adults, but not for the older adults. These results suggest that the age-related differences in object recognition performance are in part due to inefficient integration of information from working memory to longer-term memory.