<p>Data for article "Selective Control of Attention Supports the Positivity Effect in Aging" in PLOS ONE (under review).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>The group variable is coded as 1 for the young and 2 for the older participants.</p
