Dynamic information benefits unfamiliar face perception in older adults C Maguinness1, F Newell2 |
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1School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland |
| Studies using static images have reported poorer unfamiliar face perception in older (OA) than younger adults (YA). However, the role of facial motion in unfamiliar face perception with ageing remains unclear. Here, OA and YA learned faces either dynamically (video) or from a sequence of static images, with rigid (head rotation) or non-rigid (facial expression) changes. Immediately following learning, participants matched a static test image to the learned face. Test images varied by viewpoint (Experiment1); expression (Experiment2) and were familiar or novel. Although OA face matching performance was worse than YA, learning a face through rigid motion benefited matching performance in OA, particularly for novel viewpoints. Conversely, when non-rigid changes were learned, we found no difference in face matching performance across the dynamically or statically presented faces for OA and YA (although performance was relatively poor for OA group). Results from Experiment3 revealed that non-rigid motion interfered with the perception of inverted faces, suggesting that the ability to use dynamic face information for the purpose of recognition reflects a motion encoding which is specific to faces. Our results suggest that as we age face perception may benefit from cue combination, specifically spatial and dynamic, particularly when generalising across unfamiliar views. |
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