Data for article "Selective Control of Attention Supports the Positivity Effect in Aging"

Data for article "Selective Control of Attention Supports the Positivity Effect in Aging" in PLOS ONE (under review). In this study, 25 younger and 25 older adults’ eye movements were tracked while they viewed 40 triads of one positive, one negative and one neutral social scenario. The 3 scenarios were either all own-age relevant or other-age relevant (e.g. wedding versus playing with grandchildren). The data revealed a significant positivity effect (PE): Older adults devoted significantly more fixations to positive over negative stimuli than younger adults and this was enhanced for own-age stimuli. Moreover, the PE was correlated with the elderlies' specific ability to adaptively control attention over salient visual distraction, measured in a visual search (singleton) task. On the following day, recognition memory was assessed for all stimuli. The results indicated that again, a positivity preference (positive>neutral) was significantly more affected by own-age relevance in older than in young age. The data includes the relative amount of the number of fixations (fixN) as well as the relative durations of fixations (fixD) to positive, negative and neutral own-age and other-age stimuli. In addition, the file contains a column for the singleton score measuring visual top-down control (higher values indicate lower performance). The singleton_filter variable indentifies the subject who's score is missing due to technical recording problems. Finally, the file includes the corrected hitrates from the recognition memory test (hitrate-false alarms; corHit). The group variable is coded as 1 for the young and 2 for the older participants.