Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We report here two behavioural experiments that investigated the Own Age Bias (OAB), better recognition performance of own-age vs. other-age faces, measured by the Face Inversion Effect (FIE). Both experiments employed an old/new recognition task where upright and inverted own (young adults) and other (older adults) where presented intermixed. Experiment 1 (n=48), used real-life faces, and revealed a robust OAB, where a significantly larger FIE (higher recognition for upright vs. inverted faces) was found for own vs. other age faces due to a reduced performance for upright other age faces. Experiment 2 (n=48) used standardised faces and revealed no effect of OAB, and no difference between upright own vs. other age faces. We interpret our results in the context of the perceptual learning and faces recognition literature.