School of Psychology, Curtin University, Bentley, Western Australia, Australia.
School of Psychology, University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales, Australia.
Br J Psychol. 2021 Aug;112(3):645-661. doi: 10.1111/bjop.12481. Epub 2020 Nov 19.
The own-age bias (OAB) has been proposed to be caused by perceptual expertise and/or social-cognitive mechanisms. Investigations into the role of social cognition have, however, yielded mixed results. One reason for this might be the tendency for research to focus on the OAB in young adults, between young and older adult faces where other-age individuation experience is low. To explore whether social-cognitive manipulations may be successful when observers have sufficient other-age individuation experience, we examined biases involving middle-aged other-age faces and the influence of a context manipulation. Across four experiments, young adult participants were presented with middle-aged faces alongside young or older adult faces to remember. We predicted that in contexts where middle-aged faces were positioned as other-age faces (alongside young adult faces), recognition performance would be worse than when they were positioned as relative own-age faces (alongside older adult faces). However, the context manipulations did not moderate middle age face recognition. This suggests that past findings that context does not change other-age face recognition holds for other-age faces for which observers have higher individuation experience. These findings are consistent with a perceptual expertise account of the OAB but more investigation of the generality of these results is required.
自身年龄偏见（OAB）被认为是由感知专长和/或社会认知机制引起的。然而，对社会认知作用的研究结果却喜忧参半。造成这种情况的一个原因可能是研究倾向于关注年轻成年人中的 OAB，而在年轻和老年成年人面孔之间，其他年龄的个体差异经验较低。为了探讨当观察者具有足够的其他年龄个体差异经验时，社会认知干预是否可能成功，我们研究了涉及中年其他年龄面孔的偏见以及上下文干预的影响。在四项实验中，年轻的成年参与者被呈现中年面孔以及年轻或老年面孔来进行记忆。我们预测，在中年面孔被定位为其他年龄面孔（与年轻成年人面孔一起）的情况下，识别表现会比他们被定位为相对自身年龄面孔（与老年成年人面孔一起）时更差。然而，上下文干预并没有调节对中年面孔的识别。这表明，过去关于上下文不会改变其他年龄面孔识别的发现适用于观察者具有更高个体差异经验的其他年龄面孔。这些发现与 OAB 的感知专长解释一致，但需要进一步研究这些结果的普遍性。
