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 for face memory
performance.