The morphing process included marking identity salient features of two faces by setting dots to similar areas e. The number of dots necessary for morphing two faces ranged approximately between and dots per morph template. As reaction times are being recorded by the computational software during experimental procedure, for data analysis, individual mean morph levels for particular conditions were converted from milliseconds to percentages with greater numbers indicating more target information along the morph continuum.
Stimuli displaying only horizontally aligned information were generated using Matlab 7. Participants answered questions related to degree of social contact with younger 18—30 years and OAs 60—80 years analogous to Wiese et al. Subjects were asked to indicate the amount of time they spend with each age group hours per week as well as the number of different contact persons.
The questions were preceded by a short explanation asking subjects to only consider people they are familiar with. The experiment took approximately 30 min and could be aborted by the subject at any time. All participants completed the experiment. Trials were presented randomly — Figure 2 displays an experimental target trial. Subjects were instructed to press the space bar with their dominant hand of a standard keyboard as soon as they recognized a target but to show no reaction in case of target absence for each session.
No feedback was given. Both, accuracy and recognition with less target information were stressed without emphasizing either. Experimental procedure. A single trial consisted of a go-signal followed by an encoding phase of a target face presented for either 0. Subsequent delay was accompanied by a fixation cross that became enlarged twice. Each recall phase started with a different face either merging into the previously presented target face or a different control face. Participants were instructed to respond as soon as they recognized the previously presented target face but to show no reaction in case of target absence.
Face stimuli were obtained from Langner et al. Each trial was followed by an intertrial interval of 3. To familiarize subjects with the task participants trained with a set of stimuli that were not presented during the test session.
After completing the experiment the individual digit-span was assessed. Prior to the main analysis, in a first step, differences in general cognitive function and social contact with younger and older persons were being investigated. Since our task required participants to respond to a starting face that gradually merged into either the previously encoded target face or a control face there may have been differences considering the amount of target information necessary for making a familiar judgment between the different groups.
Whether YA and OA required equal amounts of target face information was being analyzed in a second step. Three subjects 2 YA did not complete the digit-span assessment and contact questionnaire due to a shortage of time.
Those subjects were, however, included in the main analysis. Social contact was measured as the time spent with other persons and as the number of contact persons.
Both groups reported more contact with their own age group in terms of time and number of persons. Next the amount of target information necessary for making a familiar judgment was analyzed. As 4 OA and 1 YA were not able to respond correctly to any target trial in specific filtered conditions, no amount of target information was being recorded for these individuals and they were therefore not included in the target information analysis.
Significant interactions were decomposed running multiple Bonferroni corrected comparisons. TABLE 1.
Summary of means and standard deviations for sensitivity, false alarms, target information, and digit span. Given our a priori predictions, the obtained data were then analyzed separately for each age group in a second step.
Three significant two-way interactions were obtained interactions involving more than two factors did not reach significance. Decomposition of both interactions is illustrated in Table 2.
This interaction will be further analyzed in the following. Both age groups profited considerably from longer exposure duration, however, there were no biases toward own-age faces as indicated by non-existent interactions.
Error bars represent standard errors. Considering that our a priori hypotheses concerned the question whether OA are able to recognize filtered faces when exposure duration is increased and old stimuli are added rather than solely presenting young faces, separate analyses for either age group were conducted testing for an own-age-bias with filtered faces.
This shows that an OAB toward recognizing filtered faces is observable in OA when exposure duration is long. Since inflated false alarm rates have previously been reported in OA such an analysis was conducted. Since no interactions were obtained, differences in false alarms were not pursued any further.
Lastly, correlations coefficients Pearson product-moment correlation, data are plotted in Figure 4 between filtered and unfiltered face recognition were calculated. OA , stimulus age younger vs. First, stimulus age was introduced: YA and OA were presented with either younger or older stimuli resulting in a fully crossed design allowing assessment of an OAB which is expressed in greater sensitivity to age-congruent stimuli as opposed to age-incongruent faces.
Second, a variation in exposure duration was introduced by providing subjects with both short and long encoding intervals. Specifically, the OAB was only observable when exposure duration was long. This age-variant result was furthermore only observable when filtered faces had to be recognized. When recognizing unfiltered faces exposure duration and stimulus age had equal effects on both age groups.
This finding adds to the notion that YA and OA do indeed process horizontal information differently Obermeyer et al. While the obtained main effects for filter and exposure duration were anticipated, the main effect for stimulus age as well as greater sensitivity to filtered older stimuli compared to filtered young stimuli were unexpected. It is hypothesized that this result is a product of the selective filtering process which may have a positive impact on older facial stimuli compared to younger faces.
First, it seems plausible to assume that older faces in general contain more information compared to younger faces. Specifically, older faces differ from younger faces concerning cues of aging like wrinkles and skin tightness. Those features are likely to have passed the selective filtering process Please compare filtered young and older faces of Figure 1 and may have added identity salient cues only to the older face stimuli. Consequently, recognition of filtered older faces may have been easier compared to younger stimuli.
This factor may, however, have had a different impact on either age group as we will discuss below. To further test for differences concerning the role of horizontal information in both age groups, it was investigated whether sensitivity to filtered faces is associated with unfiltered face recognition.
We took high correlations as indicators for targeting similar face specific processes. Results showed that processing of horizontal information was especially efficient in YA when presented with age-congruent face stimuli.
The impact of processing filtered faces on recognizing unfiltered faces was smaller when presented with older faces. An increase in exposure duration, however, was accompanied by a greater association similar to recognizing younger faces. When exposure duration was longer processing of horizontal facial cues was correlated with unfamiliar face recognition in younger adults YA regardless of stimulus age.
However, the impact of filtered face processing on unfiltered recognition was characterized by a completely different pattern in OA. Especially when exposure duration was long, sensitivity to horizontal faces had no impact on unfiltered face recognition. Among those, previously argued cues of aging as well as the absence of correlations between filtered and unfiltered recognition in OA have to be considered. First, visual aging cues might be perceived and or processed differently by YA and OA in general.
Individuals belonging to certain groups and therefore sharing a common face space e. One example to this thought is a study by Hu et al. Both age groups fixated the eyes of Caucasian faces significantly longer than the eyes of Chinese faces. Conversely, the Chinese participants scanned the mouth and nose region of Chinese faces more extensively than the corresponding areas of Caucasian faces.
Certainly, YA may be susceptible to the proposed aging cued feature-based processing as a result of the selective filtering process in a similar manner as OA are. It, however, seems plausible that this proposed effect has a greater impact on OA compared to YA. Another approach for future studies would be to compare sensitivity to older stimuli with aging cues eliminated that are not part of the general Gestalt of older faces configural processing with sensitivity to the same stimulus set containing all information including natural aging features.
Additionally, horizontal filter could be added as a factor which would allow quantifying the impact of aging cues in filtered vs. A somewhat similar approach has already been pursued recently. Examining aftereffects with hybrid images that combined the structure and shape of younger, older, and same age celebrity faces Lai et al. As only YAs were assessed in this study future research should focus on assessing OAs with an analogous procedure.
Secondly, the obtained OAB in OA but not in YA with filtered faces might be the manifestation of different face processing mechanisms used by either age group.
Since configural processing is the key feature in unfiltered face recognition, it is plausible to assume that the obtained associations between filtered and unfiltered recognition in YA primarily reflects this ability.
As OAs likewise rely on configural processing when recognizing faces e. In other words, it is speculated that OA do not perceive a holistic face to the same degree as YA do when presented with faces that only contain horizontal information.
A third finding that adds to understanding age differences in recognizing filtered faces are the obtained results of OA concerning younger faces. Most likely, OA were simply not able to extract identity-diagnostic information from filtered younger faces. The question arises, why OA were able to recognize older filtered faces at the same performance level as YAs with perception of the whole face disrupted when exposure duration was long?
Additionally, as discussed above, this type of part-based processing might be particularly efficient in OA when it comes to processing older faces. An increase of analytic processing with increased exposure duration has previously been reported. Although only very little research systematically manipulated exposure duration of the study faces, Hole showed that with longer exposure duration participants switched to a feature-matching strategy as opposed to configural processing under short presentations.
Our hypothesis that OA do not actually perceive faces when confronted with filtered stimuli is moreover supported by the repeated observation of older participants reporting that they were unable to recognize anything, when initially confronted with filtered faces prior to the experiment. Two recent publications add to understanding the role of horizontal information in face recognition. Balas et al.
Stimuli either contained vertical, horizontal or both vertical and horizontal information. Own-age faces were recognised better in the mixed-list compared to pure-list condition. The present study aimed to replicate this finding and examine its robustness in paradigms including different components of the original.
Under both mixed-list and pure-list conditions, the OAB emerged. Purchase this article with an account. Open Access. Journal of Vision September , Vol. Alerts User Alerts. You will receive an email whenever this article is corrected, updated, or cited in the literature.
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