Older adults' configural processing of faces: Role of second-order information.

Abstract

Problems with face recognition are frequent in older adults. However, the mechanisms involved have only been partially discovered. In particular, it is unknown to what extent these problems may be related to changes in configural face processing. Here, we investigated the face inversion effect (FIE) together with the ability to detect modifications in the vertical or horizontal second-order relations between facial features. We used a same/different unfamiliar face discrimination task with 33 young and 33 older adults. The results showed dissociations in the performances of older versus younger adults. There was a lack of inversion effect during the recognition of original faces by older adults. However, for modified faces, older adults showed a pattern of performance similar to that of young participants, with preserved FIE for vertically modified faces and no detectable FIE for horizontally modified faces. Most importantly, the detection of vertical modifications was preserved in older relative to young adults whereas the detection of horizontal modifications was markedly diminished. We conclude that age has dissociable effects on configural face-encoding processes, with a relative preservation of vertical compared to horizontal second-order relations processing. These results help to understand some divergent results in the literature and may explain the spared familiar face identification abilities in the daily lives of older adults.

The Affective Neuroscience of Aging

“…Compared with younger adults, older adults are less likely to look at someone’s eyes and more likely to look at their mouth or nose (Circelli et al, 2013, Firestone et al, 2007, Heisz and Ryan, 2011, Murphy and Isaacowitz, 2010, Sullivan et al, 2007, Wong et al, 2005) and are worse than younger adults at detecting configural changes in the eye region than in the mouth/nose region of the face (Chaby et al, 2011, Slessor et al, 2013). The age difference in top-bottom bias is seen for both neutral and emotional faces but not for scenes (Circelli et al, 2013).…”

Gaze Behavior Consistency among Older and Younger Adults When Looking at Emotional Faces

“…Surprisingly, relatively few studies have explored the possibility that perceptual factors might explain facial emotion recognition difficulties in healthy aging (Orgeta and Phillips, 2007), in spite of many studies indicating age-related changes in visual perception (Bian and Andersen, 2008; Andersen, 2012), especially in face processing (Firestone et al, 2007; Habak et al, 2008; Chaby et al, 2011; Konar et al, 2013). In particular, we showed in a previous study that aging affects some aspects of configural face-encoding processes (e.g., older adults were worse than younger adults at detecting configural changes in the eye region of the face only, but not in the nose–mouth region) which could be related to problems with face recognition (Chaby et al, 2011); see also (Slessor et al, 2013; Meinhardt-Injac et al, 2015).…”

Age-related differences in the distractor previewing effect with schematic faces of emotions

“…In an ERP study of neural adaption, Eimer, Gosling, Nicholas, and Kiss (2011) found (with young participants) that inverting schematic faces does not necessarily disrupt all configural processing of schematic faces by showing similar decreases in the face-sensitive N170 ERP component following photographic, upright schematic and inverted schematic faces. There is also evidence that face inversion is not sufficient to disrupt older participants' recognition of photographic faces (Chaby, Narme, & George, 2011). Thus, it is likely that older adults were using some preserved configural emotional processing from the faces that allowed them to recognize and tag (across trials) negative emotions.…”