2015) 'The own-age bias in face memory is unrelated to di erences in attention Evidence from event-related brain potentials.', Cognitive, a ective, and behavioral neuroscience., 15 (1). pp. 180-194. Further information on publisher's website:https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-014-0306-7Publisher's copyright statement:The nal publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-014-0306-7Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractParticipants are more accurate at remembering faces from their own relative to a different age group (own-age bias, OAB). A recent socio-cognitive account suggests that differential allocation of attention to old versus young faces underlies this phenomenon. Critically, empirical evidence for a direct relationship between attention to own-versus other-age faces and the OAB in memory is lacking. To fill this gap, we tested the role of attention in three different experimental paradigms, and additionally analyzed event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Experiment 1 compared learning of old and young faces during focused versus divided attention, but revealed an equivalent OAB in subsequent memory for both attention conditions. Similarly, attention manipulation during learning did not differentially affect ERPs elicited by young versus old faces. Experiment 2 examined repetition effects from task-irrelevant old and young faces presented under varying attentional load on the N250r ERP component as an index of face recognition. Independent of load, N250r effects were comparable for both age categories. Finally, in Experiment 3 we measured N2pc as an index of attentional selection of old versus young target faces in a visual search task. N2pc was not significantly different for young versus old target search conditions, suggesting equivalent orientation of attention to either face age group. Overall, we propose that the OAB in memory is largely unrelated to early attentional processes. Our findings therefore contrast predictions from socio-cognitive accounts on own-group biases in recognition memory, and are more easily reconciled with expertise-based models.

For face recognition, observers utilize both shape and texture information. Here, we investigated the relative diagnosticity of shape and texture for delayed matching of familiar and unfamiliar faces (Experiment 1) and identifying familiar and newly learned faces (Experiment 2). Within each familiarity condition, pairs of 3D-captured faces were morphed selectively in either shape or texture in 20% steps, holding the respective other dimension constant. We also assessed participants' individual face-processing skills via the Bielefelder Famous Faces Test (BFFT), the Glasgow Face Matching Test, and the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT). Using multilevel model analyses, we examined probabilities of same versus different responses (Experiment 1) and of original identity versus other/unknown identity responses (Experiment 2). Overall, texture was more diagnostic than shape for both delayed matching and identification, particularly so for familiar faces. On top of these overall effects, above-average BFFT performance was associated with enhanced utilization of texture in both experiments. Furthermore, above-average CFMT performance coincided with slightly reduced texture dominance in the delayed matching task (Experiment 1) and stronger sensitivity to morph-based changes overall, that is irrespective of morph type, in the face identification task (Experiment 2). Our findings (1) show the disproportionate importance of texture information for processing familiar face identity and (2) provide further evidence that familiar and unfamiliar face identity perception are mediated by different underlying processes.

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