Effects of age on face perception: Reduced eye region discrimination ability but intact holistic processing.

Abstract

While age-related decline in face recognition memory is well-established, the degree of decline in face perceptual abilities across the lifespan and the underlying mechanisms are incompletely characterized. In the present study, we used the part-whole task to examine lifespan changes in holistic and featural processing. After studying an intact face, participants are tested for memory of a face part (eyes, nose, mouth) with the target and foil part presented either in isolation or in the context of the whole face. To the extent that parts are encoded into a holistic face representation, an advantage is expected for part recognition when tested in the whole face condition. The task therefore provides measures of holistic processing (whole-over-isolated-part trial advantage) and featural processing for each part when tested in isolation. Using a large sample of 3,341 online participants aged 18–69 years, we found that while discrimination of the eye region decreased beginning in the 50s, both mouth discrimination accuracy and the holistic advantage of whole versus part trial discrimination were stable with age. In separate analyses by gender, we found that age-related declines in eye region accuracy were more pronounced in males than females. We discuss potential mechanistic explanations for this eye region-specific decline with age, including age-related hearing loss directing attention toward the mouth. Further, we discuss how this could be related to the age-related positivity effect, which is associated with reduced sensitivity to eye-related emotions (e.g., anger) but preserved mouth-related emotion sensitivity (e.g., happiness).

Face Feature Change Detection Ability in Developmental Prosopagnosia and Super-Recognisers

“…One possible explanation for this difference is that our participants were older than the participants used in the Lai study (mean age = 42.6, compared to mean age = 22.9). Indeed, one study examining the effect of participants’ ages on face matching and face memory found that worse performance on a face-memory task could be explained by the reduced performance on the face-matching tasks [ 50 ]; further, studies have reported specific deficits in face-feature processing with increasing age (e.g., [ 50 , 51 ]).…”