Older Adults' Configural Processing of Faces: Role of Second-Order Information
Older Adults' Configural Processing of Faces: Role of Second-Order Information
复制标题
DOI：
10.1037/a0020873
复制
发表时间：
2011-03-01
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
George, Nathalie
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Chaby, Laurence;Narme, Pauline;George, Nathalie
面部识别问题在老年人中很常见。然而，所涉及的机制仅被部分发现。特别是，尚不清楚这些问题在多大程度上可能与配置面部处理的变化有关。在这里，我们研究了面部反转效应（FIE）以及检测面部特征之间垂直或水平二阶关系修改的能力。我们对 33 名年轻人和 33 名老年人进行了相同/不同的陌生面孔辨别任务。结果显示，老年人与年轻人的表现存在差异。老年人在识别原始面孔时缺乏反转效应。然而，对于修改后的面部，老年人表现出与年轻参与者相似的表现模式，垂直修改后的面部保留了 FIE，而水平修改后的面部则没有可检测到的 FIE。最重要的是，相对于年轻人，老年人对垂直修饰的检测保留了下来，而水平修饰的检测则明显减少。我们得出的结论是，年龄对配置面部编码过程具有不可分离的影响，与水平二阶关系处理相比，垂直方向的二阶关系处理相对保留。这些结果有助于理解文献中的一些不同结果，并可能解释老年人日常生活中幸存的熟悉面孔识别能力。
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.