Abstract
Perception is context dependent. For example, the perceived orientation of a bar changes depending on the presence of oriented bars around it. Contextual effects have also been demonstrated for more complex judgements, such as facial attractiveness or expression, although it remains unclear how these contextual facial effects depend on the types of faces surrounding the target face. To examine this, we measured the perceived age (a quantifiable measure) of a target face in the presence of differently aged faces in the surround. Using a unique database of standardized passport photos, participants were asked to estimate the age of a target face which was viewed either on its own or surrounded by two different identity flanker faces. The flanker faces were either both younger or both older than the target face, with different age offsets between flankers and targets of ±5, ±10, ±15, ±20 years. We find that when a target face is surrounded by younger faces, it systematically appears younger than when viewed on its own, and when it is surrounded by older faces, it systematically appears older than when viewed on its own. Surprisingly, we find that the magnitude of the flanker effects on perceived age of the target is asymmetric with younger flankers having a greater influence than older flankers, a result that may reflect the participants' own-age bias, since all participants were young. This result holds irrespective of gender or race of the faces and is consistent with averaging.
Highlights
In experiment III, we examined whether there was an own-gender bias in age estimates, and how age estimates of a target may depend on the genders of the target and flankers, since previous studies report largest contextual effects when the items in the ensemble are physically similar to each other [24]
If the presence of flankers had no effect on the perceived age of the target we would expect age estimates to be similar across the three conditions, while target age estimates that deviate systematically away from those in the unflanked condition would suggest contextual effects
In order to examine the influence of the flankers we calculated the difference between the veridical age and the estimated age for the three flanker conditions averaged errors across all target ages for each age offset
Summary
How old we think someone is determines how we interact with them [1,2,3], and most people regularly make age judgements based on facial appearance. More recent work has addressed this issue by using both a larger number of stimuli and a broader sample of participants In this case, the authors find that estimating age is less reliable than originally proposed with a reported mean error magnitude between ±6 years [8,9] and ±8 years [10]. The authors find that estimating age is less reliable than originally proposed with a reported mean error magnitude between ±6 years [8,9] and ±8 years [10] Taken together, this reveals that people make errors in age judgements even for single faces viewed individually
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