Learning and recognizing facial identity in variable images: New insights from older adults

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent research has emphasized the importance of using images that incorporate natural variability in appearance (i.e., ambient images) to assess face learning and recognition. Across five tasks, we provide the first examination of older adults’ face learning and recognition in ambient images. Young and older adults showed comparable performance in three tasks: when recognizing a familiar face across ambient images, extracting average representations of an identity (i.e., ensemble coding) and learning a new identity from multiple images in a perceptual task. However, compared to young adults, older adults have even more difficulty matching images of unfamiliar faces and despite showing comparable benefits in sensitivity, older adults adopted a more conservative response bias after being exposed to low variability in appearance in a face memory task, resulting in them failing to recognize novel instances of a newly learned identity. We discuss the implications of our findings for older adults and the insights our findings provide for understanding both the development of face learning and recognition in childhood and the own-race recognition advantage.