Dataset: Age effects in emotional memory and associated eye movements

Mnemonic-enhanced memory has been observed for negative events. Here, we investigate its association with spatiotemporal attention, consolidation, and age. An ingenious method to study visual attention for emotional stimuli is eye tracking. Twenty young adults and twenty-one older adults encoded stimuli depicting neutral faces, angry faces, and houses while eye movements were recorded. The encoding phase was followed by an immediate and delayed (48 h) recognition assessment. Linear mixed model analyses of recognition performance with group, emotion, and their interaction as fixed effects revealed increased performance for angry compared to neutral faces in the young adults group only. Furthermore, young adults showed enhanced memory for angry faces compared to older adults. This effect was associated with a shorter fixation duration for angry faces compared to neutral faces in the older adults group. Furthermore, the results revealed that total fixation duration was a strong predictor f..., Participants
Forty-one subjects participated in our study. They were recruited by advertisements for participation in an eye-tracker memory experiment. Participants did not receive financial compensation for their participation. Inclusion criteria consisted of (1) 18–30-year age range (young adults group) or 50–90-year age range (older adults group) and (2) an MMSE score above 25.
The young adults and older adults group consisted of 20 participants [7 males (35%); mean age ± SD = 22 ± 2 years, range 18–29] and 21 participants [9 males (43%); mean age ± SD = 69 ± 7 years, range 53–87], respectively. One participant from the older adults group was not included in the eye movement analysis due to technical issues. Participants completed the Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination III (ACE-III), which includes the Mini–Mental State Examination (MMSE). All participants had an ACE-III score above 71. 
Eye Tracker and Eye Movement Recordings
Eye movement data were collected during the encoding pha...,  All analyses were performed in SPSS.