Familiarity and recognition of faces in old age

Bartlett, James C.; Fulton, Annette

doi:10.3758/bf03211147

Cited by 122 publications

(69 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…These studies have almost exclusively used emotional faces of young individuals and have not systematically varied the age of the face, even though there is evidence that faces that are more like the face of the individual studying them are recognized better than faces that are different. Specifically, evidence for an own-age bias in face recognition and person identification suggests that adults of different ages are more likely to recognize faces of their own age group than faces and persons of other ages ( Anastasi & Rhodes, 2006;Bäckman, 1991;Bartlett & Fulton, 1991;Lamont, Stewart-Williams, & Podd, 2005;Wright & Stroud, 2002). The own-age bias is generally thought to be due to the amount of exposure an individual has to certain classes of faces, in the sense that people typically see faces similar to their own more frequently and might, therefore, be more familiar with them (Bartlett & Fulton, 1991).…”

Section: P Smentioning

confidence: 99%

FACES—A database of facial expressions in young, middle-aged, and older women and men: Development and validation

Ebner

Riediger

Lindenberger

2010

Behavior Research Methods

1,046

866

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Faces are widely used as stimuli in various research fields. Interest in emotion-related differences and ageassociated changes in the processing of faces is growing. With the aim of systematically varying both expression and age of the face, we created FACES, a database comprising N 171 naturalistic faces of young, middle-aged, and older women and men. Each face is represented with two sets of six facial expressions (neutrality, sadness, disgust, fear, anger, and happiness), resulting in 2,052 individual images. A total of N 154 young, middleaged, and older women and men rated the faces in terms of facial expression and perceived age. With its large age range of faces displaying different expressions, FACES is well suited for investigating developmental and other research questions on emotion, motivation, and cognition, as well as their interactions. Information on using FACES for research purposes can be found at

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Section: P Smentioning

confidence: 99%

FACES—A database of facial expressions in young, middle-aged, and older women and men: Development and validation

Ebner

Riediger

Lindenberger

2010

Behavior Research Methods

1,046

866

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…When recognition of older faces is required, the age differences either favor the old or are absent. Bartlett and Fulton (1991) explored more closely the nature of the older adults' face recognition impairment. The start point of their study was the observation that older adults' poorer performance is most often seen in false recognition, with hit rate remaining little changed across age.…”

Section: Aging and Face Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is a relatively small step from Bartlett and Fulton's (1991) work on resemblance to the identity-blending account of unconscious transference. Bartlett and Fulton argued that older adults falsely identify those who resemble someone familiar, because context is not available.…”

Section: Aging and Face Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adult age differences in unconscious transference: Source confusion or identity blending?

Perfect

Harris

2003

Memory & Cognition

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Eyewitnesses are known often to falsely identify a familiar but innocent bystander when asked to pick out a perpetrator from a lineup. Such unconscious transferenceerrors have been attributed to either identity confusions at encoding or source retrievalerrors. Three experiments contrasted younger and older adults in their susceptibility to such misidentifications. Participants saw photographs of perpetrators, then a series of mug shots of innocent bystanders. A week later, they saw lineups containing bystanders (and others containing perpetrators in Experiment 3) and were asked whether any of the perpetrators were present. When younger faces were used as stimuli (Experiments 1 and 3), older adults showed higher rates of transference errors. When older faces were used as stimuli (Experiments 2 and 3), no such age effects in rates of unconscious transference were apparent. In addition, older adults in Experiment 3 showed an own-age bias effect for correct identification of targets. Unconscious transference errors were found to be due to both source retrieval errors and identity confusions, but age-related increases were found only in the latter.

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“…Bäckman's study also included two groups of older participants (76 and 85 years), neither of which showed any effect of age of target face. Similarly, Bartlett and Fulton (1991) showed that recognition accuracy among young adults was generally better with young adult faces than with older faces, but that recognition accuracy among the elderly showed no significant effects of target age. Thus, the few studies that have investigated this issue suggest that young participants are more accurate in recognizing same-age faces, but they have found mixed evidence on the question of whether face age has any impact on elderly participants.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Face recognition and aging: Effects of target age and memory load

2005

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In the present study, we investigated age-related decline in face recognition memory and whether this decline is moderated by the age of the target faces and by the number of faces that the participant must learn (memory load). Thirty-two participants in each of three age groups (18-39 years, 60-75 years, and 76-96 years) completed a face recognition task. Signal detection analyses confirmed that face recognition accuracy declined with age. However, this finding was qualified by an interaction between participant age and target age, which revealed that the age-related decline in face recognition accuracy occurred only for young target faces. Increased memory load was associated with comparable performance decrements across all age groups. However, memory load appears not to be the cause of these decrements. Instead, they appear to be a product of recognition load (the number of stimuli presented in the recognition phase).

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Familiarity and recognition of faces in old age

Cited by 122 publications

References 23 publications

FACES—A database of facial expressions in young, middle-aged, and older women and men: Development and validation

FACES—A database of facial expressions in young, middle-aged, and older women and men: Development and validation

Adult age differences in unconscious transference: Source confusion or identity blending?

Face recognition and aging: Effects of target age and memory load

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