Variation in gaze understanding across the life span: A process-level perspective

Following eye gaze is fundamental for many social-cognitive abilities, for example, when judging what another agent can or cannot know. While the emergence of gaze-following has been thoroughly studied on a group level, we know little about (a) the developmental trajectory beyond infancy and (b) the sources of individual differences. In Study 1, we examined gaze understanding across the lifespan (N = 471 3- to 80-years-olds; children from a mid-sized German city; international remotely tested adults). We found a steep learning curve during preschool years, in which children became more precise in locating the attentional focus of an agent. Precision levels then stayed comparably stable throughout adulthood with a minor decline toward old age. In Study 2, we formalized the process of gaze understanding in a computational cognitive model that allowed us to conceptualize individual differences in a psychologically meaningful way (N = 60 3- to 5-year-olds, 50 adults). According to our model, participants estimate pupil angles with varying levels of precision based on observing the pupil location within the agent’s eyes. In Study 3, we tested two implications of our gaze model, namely that gaze understanding could be related to vector estimation in non-social settings and perspective-taking abilities (N = 102 4- to 5-year-olds). We found that gaze understanding is associated with both of these abilities but less so with other Theory of Mind tasks. This work illustrates how the combination of reliable measurement instruments and formal theoretical models allows us to explore the in(ter)dependence of core social-cognitive processes in greater detail.