Repeated exposure to visual information leads to rapidly changing patterns of visual sampling behaviour. For instance, a viewer makes fewer fixations on an image across repeated exposures, and this change in fixations is referred to as the eye movement repetition effect. Some hippocampal amnesia studies have reported that eye movement repetition effects are hippocampal-dependent, others have shown that eye movement repetition effects are hippocampal-independent. In addition, older adults tend to exhibit diminished eye movement repetition effects as well as hippocampal volume loss. However, the influence of aging on the relationship between the eye movement repetition effects and hippocampal structure remains unclear. In the current study, eye movements of fifty younger adults and fifty older adults were monitored during MRI scanning while they viewed faces that were repeated up to four times and made an age judgement. We found that, compared to the younger adults, the fixations made by older adults did not significantly vary as a function of repetition. Thus, compared to the younger adults, older adults exhibited a diminished eye movement repetition effect. Moreover, changes in viewing patterns across repetition were related to hippocampal volume in younger adults only. Therefore, in older adults, a decline in hippocampal integrity may be responsible for the lack of eye movement repetition effects.