Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present study investigated age-related changes in the ability to engage cue integration capacities to understand a speaker’s referential intention. Forty young adults (M = 22.18 years, SD = 1.39) and 40 older adults (M = 67.70 years, SD = 4.86) were tested on a cue-integration task with eye-tracking, where they integrated multiple cues to identify a target object across two conditions. In the three-cue condition, they were presented with contextual, semantic and gaze cues, while the two-cue condition consisted of only the contextual and semantic cues. Behavioral results showed that overall, older adults were less accurate in selecting the target object than young adults in our task. Furthermore, eye-tracking results indicated that older adults were less likely to distinguish between the target and non-target objects than young adults. Our results suggest an age-related decline in the ability to integrate multiple cues when inferring referential intention. These findings provide evidence for communicative challenges in late adulthood.