DFG Research Unit Person Perception, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Am Steiger 3/1, 07743 Jena, Germany.
Neuroimage. 2013 Jul 1;74:306-17. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.02.051. Epub 2013 Mar 7.
Participants more accurately remember own-age relative to other-age faces (own-age bias, OAB). The present study tested whether this effect is related to more efficient holistic processing of own-age faces. Young adult and older participants performed a composite face task with young and old faces, in which they indicated whether the upper half of two subsequent composite faces was identical or not. The lower half of the second face was always different, and face halves were horizontally misaligned in 50% of the trials. Both participant groups were more efficient to correctly identify same upper halves in the misaligned relative to the aligned condition, and this composite face effect (CFE), a marker of holistic face processing, was stronger for young faces. Analysis of event-related potentials revealed strong misalignment effects in the N170, which were more pronounced for young faces in both groups. Critically, in the subsequent N250r a stronger misalignment effect for young faces was detected in young participants only. Since N250r may reflect the facilitated access of a perceptual representation of a previously presented face, this finding is interpreted to reflect young participants' more efficient representation of own-age faces as a whole, which may contribute to their OAB in memory.
参与者更准确地记住自己年龄的面孔相对于其他年龄的面孔（自身年龄偏差，OAB）。本研究测试了这种效应是否与自身年龄面孔的整体处理效率更高有关。年轻成年参与者和老年参与者都完成了一项包含年轻和老年面孔的复合面孔任务，他们需要判断两个连续的复合面孔的上半部分是否相同。第二张脸的下半部分总是不同的，而且在 50%的试验中，脸的两半部分是水平错开的。两个参与者群体在错位条件下正确识别相同上半部分的效率都更高，而这种复合面孔效应（CFE）是整体面孔处理的标志，对于年轻面孔来说更强。事件相关电位分析显示 N170 中存在强烈的错位效应，在两个群体中年轻面孔的效应更为明显。关键的是，只有年轻参与者在随后的 N250r 中检测到年轻面孔的错位效应更强。由于 N250r 可能反映了对先前呈现的面孔的知觉表征的促进访问，因此这一发现被解释为反映了年轻参与者对自身年龄的面孔整体更有效的表示，这可能有助于他们在记忆中的 OAB。
