Tracking developmental differences in real-world social attention across adolescence, young adulthood and older adulthood

Detecting and responding appropriately to social information in one’s environment is a vital part of everyday social interaction. We report two well-powered, pre-registered experiments that examined how social attention develops across the lifespan, comparing adolescents (10-19 years old), young (20-40 years old) and older (60-80 years old) adults. In two real-world tasks, participants were immersed in different social interaction situations – a face-to-face conversation and navigating an environment – and their attention to social and non-social content was recorded using eye-tracking glasses. Results revealed that, compared to young adults, adolescents and older adults attended less to social information (i.e. the face) during face-to-face conversation, and to people when navigating the real-world. Thus, we provide evidence that real-world social attention undergoes age-related change, and these developmental differences might be a key mechanism that influences Theory of Mind among adolescents and older adults, with potential implications for predicting successful social interactions in daily life.