Chard, J. , Press, C. & Cook, R.
Birkbeck, University of London
A range of deficits have been found in tasks involving face processing in healthy aging - for example, in identity recognition and deriving affective and mental states from facial expressions. It is plausible that such deficits could produce a cascade of communication difficulties, contributing to the isolation and associated social and health difficulties that can be experienced in later life. Understanding the sources of age-related deficits in face processing is a first step towards developing effective interventions.
Predictive coding models suggest that perceptual systems - including those involved in perceiving others - are hierarchically arranged with priors aiding the generation of rapid, veridical percepts from noisy sensory input. In the case of faces, these priors would include information that faces possess a ?first order? configuration of two eyes above a nose and mouth (which is common to all commonly encountered faces), and that the ?second order? precise spacing of these features (as well as differences in the local level features themselves) determines identity and some facial expressions.
Given that previous work has suggest older adults (OAs) have specific deficits in configural processing in non-social domains, we investigated whether atypicalities in face perception shown by OAs may reflect a disrupted ability to form second order configural representations.
In a task involving the rapid representation of face and houses, we found specific deficits in configural relative to featural processing in OAs compared to healthy young adult controls.
These results are consistent with the idea that healthy aging is associated with a reduced ability to form second order configural representations, suggesting that social difficulties that characterise aging populations could reflect selective impairments in higher levels of their perceptual inference mechanisms.