Age biases the judgment rather than the perception of an ambiguous figure

Ambroos Brouwer,Xuxi Jin,Aisha Humaira Waldi,Steven Verheyen

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-88139-1

Abstract

Older participants who are briefly presented with the ‘my wife/mother-in-law’ ambiguous figure estimate its age to be higher than young participants do. This finding is thought to be the result of a subconscious social group bias that influences participants’ perception of the figure. Because people are better able to recognize similarly aged individuals, young participants are expected to perceive the ambiguous figure as a young woman, while older participants are more likely to recognize an older lady. We replicate the difference in age estimates, but find no relationship between participants’ age and their perception of the ambiguous figure. This leads us to conclude that the positive relationship between participants’ age and their age estimates of the ambiguous ‘my wife/mother-in-law’ figure is better explained by the own-age anchor effect, which holds that people use their own age as a yard stick to judge the age of the figure, regardless of whether the young woman or the older lady is perceived. Our results disqualify the original finding as an example of cognitive penetrability: the participants’ age biases their judgment of the ambiguous figure, not its perception.

Highlights

Encode faces does not influence the size of the group difference, suggesting that the bias presents automatically, which is in line with the unconscious age effects on face perception observed by Nicholls and colleagues
If superior recognition of faces from one’s own age group is at the basis of the finding by Nicholls et al, this would imply that an unconscious social group bias led participants to recognize the woman in the ambiguous ‘my wife/mother-in-law’ figure who most closely matches their age group, resulting in a higher age estimate by older than by young participants
The own-age anchor effect might have a similar origin as the own-age bias in face recognition: both biases could result from increased familiarity with people of one’s own age[34]

Summary

Introduction

Encode faces does not influence the size of the group difference, suggesting that the bias presents automatically, which is in line with the unconscious age effects on face perception observed by Nicholls and colleagues. The ownage social group bias predicts that young and older participants are respectively more inclined to see the young woman and the older lady in the ambiguous ’my wife/mother-in-law’ figure, and that this difference in perception is what is driving the higher age estimates by older than by young participants.

Results

Conclusion