Age and aging in face perception and memory
Final Report Abstract
Taken together, the experiments carried out for this project yielded a wealth of novel findings on cognitive aging in person perception. Although the last years have seen a substantial growth of research activity in this field, the present project is the first to systematically examine aging effects at all major processing stages of person recognition, from early structural encoding (Exp. 1-3), via perceptual representations of faces (Exp. 4-6), up to accessing semantic and name information (Exp. 6 & 8). The results suggest modest effects of aging on early perceptual face processing stages. A number of N170 effects that are well-established in young adults have also been observed in older participants (such as the categorical adaptation effect (Exp. 1), the face inversion effect and enhanced amplitudes for eye stimuli (Exp. 2), as well as the face misalignment effect (Exp. 3). Similarly, older adults show evidence for an own-race bias, which is accompanied by an N170 ethnicity effect highly similar to the one observed in younger adults (Exp. 4), again suggesting overall intact early face perception. However, these effects are typically reduced in older adults, arguing for some quantitative age-related differences at the structural encoding stage. At the same time, the N250r was either completely absent (Exp.3) or substantially reduced in older adults (Exp. 6). Accordingly, accessing perceptual representations for individual face recognition seems to be more strongly affected by cognitive aging. Finally, whereas accessing semantic person information seems to be largely preserved in older adults (Exp. 6), accessing context information about familiar names is substantially reduced and accompanied by a qualitative change (i.e., a polarity-reversal) in the underlying neural generators (Exp. 8). These findings complement previous knowledge on face recognition and person perception by adding an aging component to theoretical developments in this area of research. Finally, they inform research on cognitive aging by demonstrating specific loci of age-related processing differences in person perception and memory, a domain of particular importance for older adults.
Publications
-
(2012). Daily-life contact affects the own-age bias and neural correlates of face memory in elderly participants. Neuropsychologia, 50, 3496-3508
Wiese, H., Komes, J., & Schweinberger, S.R.
-
(2012). Face recognition memory across the adult lifespan: ERP evidence from the own-age bias. Psychology and Aging, 27, 1066-1081
Wolff, N., Wiese, H., & Schweinberger, S.R.
-
(2013). Ageing faces in ageing minds: The own-age bias in face recognition memory. Visual Cognition, 21, 1337-1363
Wiese, H., Komes, J., & Schweinberger, S.R.
-
(2013). Holistic face processing of own- and other-age faces in young and older participants: ERP evidence from the composite face task. NeuroImage, 74, 306-317
Wiese, H., Kachel, U., & Schweinberger, S.R.
-
(2013). How experience shapes memory for faces: An event-related potential study on the own-age bias. Biological Psychology, 94, 369-379
Wiese, H., Wolff, N., Steffens, M., & Schweinberger, S.R.
-
(2014). Fluency affects source memory for familiar names in younger and older adults: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. NeuroImage, 92, 90-105
Komes, J., Schweinberger, S.R., & Wiese, H.
-
(2014). Preserved fine-tuning of face perception and memory: Evidence from the own-race bias in high- and low-performing older adults. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 6:60, 1-10
Komes, J., Schweinberger, S.R., & Wiese, H.
-
(2015). Neural correlates of cognitive aging during the perception of facial age: The role of relatively distant and local texture information. Frontiers in Psychology, 6:1420
Komes, J., Schweinberger, S.R., & Wiese, H.
-
(2017). Age-related changes in face recognition: Neural correlates of repetition and semantic priming in young and older adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 43, 1254-1273
Wiese, H., Komes, J., Tuettenberg, S., Leidinger, J., & Schweinberger, S. R.
