Neural correlates of cognitive aging during the perception of facial age: the role of relatively distant and local texture information

Abstract

Previous event-related potential (ERP) research revealed that older relative to younger adults show reduced inversion effects in the N170 (with more negative amplitudes for inverted than upright faces), suggestive of impairments in face perception. However, as these studies used young to middle-aged faces only, this finding may reflect preferential processing of own- relative to other-age faces rather than age-related decline. We conducted an ERP study in which young and older participants categorized young and old upright or inverted faces by age. Stimuli were presented either unfiltered or low-pass filtered at 30, 20, or 10 cycles per image (CPI). Response times revealed larger inversion effects, with slower responses for inverted faces, for young faces in young participants. Older participants did not show a corresponding effect. ERPs yielded a trend toward reduced N170 inversion effects in older relative to younger adults independent of face age. Moreover, larger inversion effects for young relative to old faces were detected, and filtering resulted in smaller N170 amplitudes. The reduced N170 inversion effect in older adults may reflect age-related changes in neural correlates of face perception. A smaller N170 inversion effect for old faces may indicate that facial changes with age hamper early face perception stages.

Age-related differences in face recognition: Neural correlates of repetition and semantic priming in young and older adults.

“…N170 amplitude differences have been suggested to reflect more effortful processing during early stages of face perception in older adults, which is also in line with the finding of smaller N170 inversion effects in this age group (e.g., Gao et al, 2009;Komes et al, 2015).…”

“…More recent work suggests that the presence or absence of these age-related effects may depend on both performance levels (Komes, Schweinberger, & Wiese, 2014b) and the exact age of the older participants (Komes, Schweinberger, & Wiese, 2015).…”

Inequality between biases in face memory: Event-related potentials reveal dissociable neural correlates of own-race and own-gender biases

“…Experiments on the own-age bias do not show larger N170 amplitudes for other-age faces. Although the N170 is typically larger for older adult relative to young adult faces, this effect is similarly observed in young and older adult participants and thus cannot contribute to own-age biases in memory performance (Komes, Schweinberger, & Wiese, 2015;Wiese, Schweinberger, & Hansen, 2008). Moreover, previous research did not yield differences in N170 amplitude during the processing of facial gender (Mouchetant-Rostaing & Giard, 2003;Mouchetant-Rostaing, Giard, Bentin, Aguera, & Pernier, 2000), or purely social in-vs. outgroups (Cassidy et al, 2014).…”

Same-gender distractors are not so easy to reject: ERP evidence of gender categorization

“…We therefore conclude that facial gender categorization does not occur at this early perceptual processing stage. Interestingly, the N170 distinguishes between faces from different ethnic backgrounds (see Wiese, 2013 , for an overview) and between young and older adult faces (e.g., Komes, Schweinberger, & Wiese, 2015 ; Wiese, Schweinberger, & Hansen, 2008a ), suggesting that categorization according to ethnicity and age may well occur at this processing stage. Together, these findings suggest that gender categorization is perceptually more difficult and/or cognitively more demanding and therefore requires more in-depth processing performed at later stages.…”