Face recognition

This study provides evidence for an age bias in face recognition. Younger adults viewed short video clips of young actors or of actors over the age of 60 performing everyday actions. One week later, participants were tested on their memory for these events. Recognition event types included same, completely new, and conjunction items. In conjunction items, a familiar actor performed a familiar action that had actually been performed by someone else during encoding. Participants performed well at picking out the new and old events, but had more difficulty distinguishing between the conjunction events. Younger adults were significantly worse at recognizing the conjunction items when the age of the actor was different from encoding to retrieval. This study supports the hypothesis that people are better able to recognize and distinguish others within a similar age range compared to people outside that range.