Abstract
Recent psychophysical research supports the notion that horizontal information of a face is primarily important for facial identity processes. Even though this has been demonstrated to be valid for young adults, the concept of horizontal information as primary informative source has not yet been applied to older adults’ ability to correctly identify faces. In the current paper, the role different filtering methods might play in an identity processing task is examined for young and old adults, both taken from student populations. Contrary to most findings in the field of developmental face perception, only a near-significant age effect is apparent in upright and un-manipulated presentation of stimuli, whereas a bigger difference between age groups can be observed for a condition which removes all but horizontal information of a face. It is concluded that a critical feature of human face perception, the preferential processing of horizontal information, is less efficient past the age of 60 and is involved in recognition processes that undergo age-related decline usually found in the literature.
Highlights
Humans rely heavily on the sense of vision, and there is perhaps no stimulus of greater social importance than a face
Individual outliers of the remaining data points were treated by means of inter-quartile range (IQR) outlier exclusion [values below as well as above, Hoaglin et al, 1983; Tukey, 1977]
Morph levels spanning the upper and lower 20% of either end of the morph-degree spectrum were grouped together to perform a more robust analysis, since accuracy rates for these morph levels were very similar across orientation and filter conditions within the age groups [younger adults (YA): F (2,29) = 0.89, p = 0.416; older adults (OA): F (2,29) = 0.42, p = 0.662]
Summary
Humans rely heavily on the sense of vision, and there is perhaps no stimulus of greater social importance than a face. Predicting other people’s intentions or behavior is one such important social interaction that is mediated by face processing (Baron-Cohen, 1994, 1995) This kind of visual processing has been demonstrated to be susceptible to an aging brain: older adults (OA) are found to exhibit lower sensitivity scores than younger adults (YA; Grady et al, 2000; Firestone et al, 2007) as well as higher latencies (Maylor and Valentine, 1992). Since face perception and its importance to memory processes is a key cognitive component that ensures adequate functioning at a higher age, effort is being put into finding possible reasons for this apparent age-related decline by the fields of memory, cognition, and human lifespan development
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