Age-related changes in eye movements during pictorial recall in older adults

During the recall of pictorial information, individuals typically exhibit eye movements directed toward the locations they focused on during perceptual encoding. This behavior is thought to support memory retrieval by linking spatial information to cognitive processes. Given the known memory decline associated with healthy aging, investigating age-related changes in eye movements during recall is crucial. We compared the eye movement patterns of older (N = 38, 65–75 years) and younger adults (N = 37, 20–35 years) during different pictorial recall tasks. Both groups tended to look back at the original stimulus locations; however, this effect was less pronounced in older adults. They displayed less systematic and more dispersed fixations across the screen. Moreover, eye position information generalized to novel objects from previously seen categories in both groups. In terms of performance, older adults performed worse than younger adults on an old/new recognition task but not on a task assessing visual detail recall. Older adults rated their mental images as more vivid than younger adults did, which may reflect differences in the perception or interpretation of vividness, or subjective bias. The observed pattern of eye behavior, together with the relatively preserved recall performance, suggests that older adults rely less on embodied strategies, consistent with prior findings indicating an age-related shift toward gist-based representations. Overall, our results demonstrate that eye movement behavior during pictorial recall changes with age, highlighting the need for further investigation into the underlying mechanisms and possible consequences of this change.