It is important to establish the role of age in face-processing since perceived-age is a dimension that may be used to encode faces within memory. While previous research has demonstrated faces can be categorised by age, a question that has not been addressed is how well people are able to do so. This study identifies the extent to which people can categorise faces on the basis of age and also explores the nature of the visual information used for this. The evidence suggests that age-perception is much more complex than has been previously suggested. Using realistic faces as stimuli, it becomes apparent that people are adept at using a wide variety of cues to age. Overall, this demonstrates that we have a sophisticated understanding of the changes that occur through ageing, that we can use with a high degree of subtlety and accuracy. Given the robust nature of information about age and the ability to which it can be used to differentiate faces, age must be influential at encoding. However, the ability to determine and encode a face's physical properties at one point in time can not be a full explanation for the way faces are represented simply because those physical properties do not stay the same over time. The ageing face can therefore be used as a tool to gain greater insight into what facial information is utilised for individual recognition. This was investigated using a recognition paradigm where the individual faces were of different ages to those initially presented and hence displayed different physical properties. The evidence shows that recognition despite age-induced changes is possible; this implies that there is not a one to one mapping between the physical properties at encoding and those that the memory system operates on to accomplish recognition.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:244355 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | George, Patricia A. |
| Publisher | University of Sussex |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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