Differential attentional allocation and subsequent recognition for young and older adult faces

Abstract

Studies examining own-age recognition biases report inconsistent results and often utilize paradigms that present faces individually and in isolation. We investigated young and older adults' attention towards young and older faces during learning and whether differential attention influences recognition. Participants viewed complex scenes while their eye movements were recorded; each scene contained two young and two older faces. Half of the participants formed scene impressions and half prepared for a memory test. Participants then completed an old/new face recognition task. Both age groups looked longer at young than older faces; however, only young adults showed an own-age recognition advantage. Participants in the memory condition looked longer at faces but did not show enhanced recognition relative to the impressions condition. Overall, attention during learning did not influence recognition. Our results provide evidence for a young adult face bias in attentional allocation but suggest that longer looking does not necessarily indicate deeper encoding.

Keywords:

• Face recognition
• Own-age bias
• Attention
• Task instructions
• Complex scenes

Notes

¹ We elected to examine only total visit duration for non-face items in the scenes as visit duration was our primary variable of interest and best reflected how much time was spent attending to any given stimulus.

² Given that we found evidence for a young adult looking time advantage for both participant age groups, we conducted this same analysis to examine whether there was a relationship between a young adult looking time advantage and a young adult recognition advantage. The overall model was not significant, Adjusted R² = .06, F(7, 72) = 1.69, p = .13, but there was a significant predictor of participant age, β = –.32, p = .007; young adults showed a larger young adult recognition advantage than older adults.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Discovery Accelerator Supplement Award from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada grant (CJM), a Canada Foundation for Innovation grant (CJM), and a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (LAS).