Age and aging in face perception and memory

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Stefan R. Schweinberger, since 7/2014
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2009 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 69199027

Although humans are typically considered to be experts in face recognition, such expertise is not comparably pronounced for all different categories of faces. It is known that young adults show more accurate memory for own-age faces, while a corresponding own-age bias (OAB) has not consistently been observed in elderly participants. During the first funding period, several experiments were conducted to describe and understand the OAB and its event-related potential (ERP) correlates in more detail. For instance, we found that young adult participants show similar recognition memory for young and young middle-aged (up to ap-proximately 45 years) faces, but decreased recognition for older faces. An OAB in elderly participants was found to depend on the amount of contact towards own-age versus younger persons. While young relative to old faces elicited larger occipito-temporal P2 components and increased N170 inversion effects, suggesting more in-depth perceptual processing for young faces, increased ERP old/new effects accompanied the occurrence of a behavioral OAB in several experiments, which argues for increased recollection to underlie the effect. The research proposed for the second funding period will focus more closely on changes in face processing and memory as well as corresponding neural correlates with increasing par-ticipant age. Accordingly, I will investigate effects of aging on (i) perceptual face processing (using categorical adaptation and the composite face effect, which tests holistic processing of faces), (ii) the acquisition of new perceptual representations of faces (by studying face rec-ognition memory and face identity learning), and (iii) the access to semantic and name re-presentations (using semantic priming paradigms and learning studies, which will train new face-name and face-occupation associations). ERP correlates of these processing levels (such as N170, N250, and N400, respectively) will be compared between young and elderly participants. The project will thus contribute to the overall aim and mission of the research unit by adding novel and theoretically relevant information about age-related changes at all processing levels suggested by current models of person perception.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 1097: Person Perception
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Holger Wiese, until 7/2014