Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.
Cito Institute for Educational Measurement, Arnhem, The Netherlands.
Exp Brain Res. 2022 Sep;240(9):2471-2480. doi: 10.1007/s00221-022-06411-w. Epub 2022 Aug 19.
Our judgement of certain facial characteristics such as emotion, attractiveness or age, is affected by context. Faces that are flanked by younger faces, for example, are perceived as being younger, whereas faces flanked by older faces are perceived as being older. Here, we investigated whether contextual effects in age perception are moderated by own age effects. On each trial, a target face was presented on the screen, which was flanked by two faces. Flanker faces were either identical to the target face, were 10 years younger or 10 years older than the target face. We asked 40 older (64-69 years) and 43 younger adults (24-29) to estimate the age of the target face. Our results replicated previous studies and showed that context affects age estimation of faces flanked by target faces of different ages. These context effects were more pronounced for younger compared to older flankers but present across both tested age groups. An own-age advantage was observed for older adults for unflanked faces who had larger estimation errors for younger faces compared to older faces and younger adults. Flanker effects, however, were not moderated by own-age effects. It is likely that the increased effect of younger flankers is due to mechanisms related to perceptual averaging.
我们对某些面部特征（如情绪、吸引力或年龄）的判断会受到上下文的影响。例如，两侧是年轻面孔的脸会被认为更年轻，而两侧是年长面孔的脸会被认为更年长。在这里，我们研究了年龄感知中的上下文效应是否受到自身年龄效应的调节。在每次试验中，屏幕上都会呈现一个目标面孔，其两侧是两个面孔。侧颜与目标面孔相同、比目标面孔年轻 10 岁或年长 10 岁。我们要求 40 名年长（64-69 岁）和 43 名年轻成年人（24-29 岁）估计目标面孔的年龄。我们的结果复制了之前的研究，表明上下文会影响不同年龄的目标面孔两侧的面孔的年龄估计。与年长的侧颜相比，年轻的侧颜对面孔年龄估计的影响更为明显，但在两个测试年龄组中都存在。对于未被侧颜包围的面孔，年长成年人会出现自身年龄优势，他们对年轻面孔的估计误差大于对年长面孔的估计误差，而年轻成年人则相反。然而，侧颜效应不受自身年龄效应的调节。年轻侧颜影响更大的原因可能是由于与感知平均相关的机制。
