Eye Movement Pattern in Face Recognition is Associated with Cognitive Decline in the Elderly

Abstract

Eye movement patterns are shown to reflect underlying cognitive processes. Here we investigated the relationship between eye movement patterns in face recognition and cognitive performance during natural aging through modeling and comparing eye movement of young (18-24 years) and older (65-81 years) adults using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based approach. We found that older adults had worse face recognition performance than young adults, particularly in the false alarm rate, and their recognition performance was correlated with their cognitive status assessed by the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). Eye movement analysis with HMM revealed two different patterns among the participants: a holistic strategy that focused mainly on the center of the face, and an analytic strategy that had more fixations on individual facial features. We found that participants using the analytic strategy had better recognition performance, particularly in the false alarm rate, than those using the holistic strategy. This result suggests that acquiring high visual acuity information from individual facial features through eye movements may be essential in face recognition. Significantly more older adults adopted the holistic strategy, whereas more young adults adopted the analytic strategy, consistent with the finding that older adults had worse face recognition performance than young adults. Interestingly, older adults with lower cognitive status were associated with higher likelihood of using the holistic strategy. These results suggest an association between holistic eye movement patterns and cognitive decline in the elderly.