Face recognition declines with age may lie in how your eyes move

By Dr. Liji Thomas, MDReviewed by Lauren HardakerJul 14 2026

Older adults may retain the visual strategies learned earlier in life, but declining eye movement consistency could make those routines harder to execute, helping explain why recognizing familiar faces becomes more difficult with age. 

Study: The Role of Eye Movement Consistency in Aging-Related Decline in Face Recognition. Image credit: CGN089/Shutterstock.com

A recent study published in the journal npj Science of Learning found that older age was associated with less consistent eye movements during face viewing, which was linked to poorer face recognition performance with aging.

How face recognition changes with aging

With the rapid aging of the global population, understanding cognitive aging has become an important public health priority because age-related cognitive decline can reduce older adults' quality of life. One important aspect of this decline is impaired face recognition, which can make everyday social interactions more difficult and has therefore become an important target for interventions.

Face recognition develops gradually over the lifespan. During childhood, individuals learn increasingly consistent visual routines for scanning faces, while more individualized, or idiosyncratic, eye movement patterns emerge by early adulthood. In adults, a more eye-focused scanning pattern is associated with better face recognition, which the authors suggest reflects the high diagnostic value of information contained in the eye region. This relationship is not observed in children, however, likely because they have not yet learned to efficiently extract information from this part of the face.

As these visual routines become well established in young adulthood, differences in eye-movement consistency become less informative for predicting individual differences in face recognition, whereas individual scanning patterns become more important. In contrast, previous research has shown that older adults generally perform worse on face recognition tasks, with lower discrimination accuracy and slower response times.

Earlier studies have also suggested that older adults tend to make more transitions between facial features and adopt less eye-focused scanning strategies than younger adults. However, whether aging is also associated with declining eye-movement consistency, and whether this contributes to poorer face recognition independently of age-related cognitive decline, remain unclear.

Study investigates cognition, eye movements, and recognitio

Cognitive abilities like working memory, executive function, and visual attention are apparently linked to eye movement pattern and consistency. Aging-related declines in these cognitive abilities could perhaps underlie the increase in eye movement inconsistency and variation in eye movement pattern that affect face recognition. Conversely, other research suggests that these parameters themselves contribute to decreased face recognition performance independent of cognitive impairment.

The authors therefore used the Dalhousie Computerized Attention Battery (DalCAB) to examine cognitive abilities along with eye tracking and face recognition in 301 Asian adults aged 40–81 years using eye Hidden Markov Models (EMHMM), in a cross-sectional study. The aim was to assess the relative roles of each of these components.

Previous research has linked greater eye movement entropy to poorer face recognition in both children and adults, as well as to less efficient neural processing of faces, as measured using electroencephalography (EEG). Based on these findings, the authors hypothesized that increasing age would be associated with poorer face recognition, less eye-focused scanning patterns, and less consistent eye movements.

To measure this consistency, they assessed both overall eye movement entropy, which reflects the overall variability of eye movements, and C3 entropy, which measures how consistently the eyes move from the second to the third fixation when viewing a face.

Key findings

Older age linked to poorer face recognition

The researchers first examined how aging affected cognitive performance using the Dalhousie Computerized Attention Battery (DalCAB). Older age was consistently associated with slower reaction times across all cognitive tasks, indicating general psychomotor slowing, as well as changes in inhibitory control and verbal working memory. The findings also suggested possible declines in spatial working memory and spatial orienting, consistent with previous research.

These age-related changes were reflected in face recognition performance. Older participants showed poorer discrimination between previously seen and new faces, produced more false recognitions, and took longer to respond. However, after accounting for the measured cognitive abilities, age remained associated with poorer discrimination and a higher false alarm rate, suggesting that cognitive decline alone did not fully explain the reduction in face recognition performance.

Older age linked to lower eye movement consistency

The researchers then investigated whether aging was associated with changes in the way participants visually scanned faces. Contrary to their hypothesis, age was not associated with changes in eye-movement patterns, such as whether participants focused more on the eyes or the nose. Instead, older age was linked to lower eye movement consistency, meaning participants followed less predictable visual scanning routines when viewing faces.

After accounting for age-related cognitive decline, only C3 entropy, a measure describing the predictability of the third eye fixation based on the second fixation, remained significantly associated with age. Exploratory analyses further suggested that reduced eye-movement consistency was associated with poorer selective attention and inhibitory control, implying that age-related declines in these cognitive processes may make it more difficult to consistently execute well-established visual routines.

Eye movement behavior predicts face recognition

Although aging was not associated with changes in overall eye-movement patterns in this cohort, participants who adopted a more eye-focused scanning pattern achieved better face recognition performance and produced fewer false recognitions. Likewise, greater eye-movement consistency was associated with higher recognition accuracy, fewer false alarms, and faster recognition responses.

Further analyses suggested that reduced eye movement consistency may partially account for the relationship between aging and poorer face recognition. Specifically, lower consistency significantly mediated the association between age and false alarm rate, while its effect on discrimination sensitivity was weaker after correction for multiple comparisons. 

Hierarchical regression analyses showed that a more nose-focused scanning pattern and lower eye-movement consistency together explained additional variation in poorer face recognition performance beyond the effects of age and measured cognitive abilities. These factors also accounted for additional variation in false alarm rates.

Taken together, the findings suggest that eye movement consistency plays different roles across the lifespan. During childhood, increasing consistency supports the development of face recognition, while in young adulthood, highly individualized scanning routines make consistency a less useful predictor of recognition ability. In later adulthood, however, eye movement consistency appears to become important once again alongside scanning pattern.

This finding suggests that older adults did not completely forget the eye movement pattern/visual routine that they had developed early in life. Rather, it may be the decline in selective attention and inhibitory control that makes the execution of these routines difficult, leading to declines in eye movement consistency.

Drawing on previous computational modeling research, the authors also suggest that the increased eye movement entropy observed in older adults may reflect greater fixation noise associated with declining sensorimotor function, which could further impair face recognition.

Study findings may not generalize to all populations

The study had several limitations that should be considered when interpreting the findings. The face recognition task used only younger adult faces, meaning it remains unclear whether the same relationships would be observed when older adults recognize faces closer to their own age. In addition, the study included only Asian participants viewing Asian faces. Previous research has shown that eye movement patterns during face recognition differ across cultures, so the findings may not generalize to other populations.

The study was also cross-sectional, meaning it cannot determine whether reduced eye movement consistency causes declines in face recognition or simply occurs alongside them. Furthermore, although participants ranged in age from 40 to 81 years, most were between 50 and 70 years old, which may limit the generalizability of the findings across the broader adult lifespan. Finally, the cognitive assessment focused primarily on attention and executive function, while other potentially relevant abilities, such as long-term memory, were not examined.

Eye movement consistency may help preserve face recognition

The findings suggest that age-related declines in face recognition are associated not only with changes in attention and executive function, but also with reduced consistency in the visual routines people use to scan faces. While older adults appear to retain the individualized eye movement patterns developed earlier in life, age-related declines in selective attention and inhibitory control may make these routines more difficult to execute consistently, contributing to poorer recognition performance.

Although the cross-sectional design means causality cannot be established, the results highlight eye movement consistency as a potential target for future interventions. Longitudinal studies will be needed to determine how these visual routines change with age and whether training designed to strengthen eye movement consistency or attentional control can help preserve face recognition in later life.

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