Do Teenagers and Older Adults Ignore You?

teenagers on their phones by the sea
  "alexandre-desane-XdybbNeD1Ww-unsplash" by alexandre-desane.

New research from PhD candidate Martina De Lillo and Professor Heather Ferguson has found that older adults, as well as adolescents, pay less attention to social cues in real-world interactions than their young adult counterparts.

The findings from their research have been published by Nature Human Behaviour and show that social attention undergoes age-related change, which potentially can affect how successfully people can interpret social interactions in daily life and throughout life.

The research, conducted here at the School of Psychology, is the first of its kind to examine how social attention is allocated during adolescence and whether it differs from adulthood, according to the authors. Three groups of volunteers aged 10-19, 20-40 and 60-80 were recorded in real-world social interaction situations including face-to-face conversation and navigating an environment, with eye-tracking glasses used to monitor their interactions.

The findings revealed that teenagers and older adults spend 12 per cent less time looking at the face of someone they are talking to, and two per cent less time looking at people in the navigation task compared to young adults aged 20 to 40.

“Interpreting the facial expression, tone of voice and gestures of others is a vital element of social interaction.These skills allow us to make rapid inferences about others’ mental states, such as their intentions, emotions, desires and beliefs.'”

Researchers Martina and Heather have highlighted the importance of these findings as interpreting facial expressions, voice tone and gestures are key elements of social interaction, and successful social interaction plays a crucial role in enhancing a person’s well-being.

The research has been reported in both The Times, the Daily Mail and McKnights