Evidence for holistic processing of facial age

Abstract

A composite face, produced by pairing the top and bottom halves from two different faces, produces a strong percept of a “new” face: It is difficult to identify either half in isolation. Three experiments examined whether a similar “composite face effect” (CFE) occurs with age judgements. Composites contained halves from faces of different ages. Participants tried to judge the age of the top half, ignoring the bottom. Experiment 1 found that age estimates for the composites’ top halves were biased towards the bottom halves’ chronological ages. Inverting the stimuli attenuated this effect but did not eliminate it entirely. The CFE for age perception is not based on skin texture information, since it persists when texture is eliminated by blurring or random noise (Experiments 2 and 3). Methodological differences preclude too detailed a comparison with other CFEs, but possibly the CFEs for age, recognition, and expression perception are all based on a common initial “holistic” encoding phase in face processing.