Different Facets of Age Perception in People with Developmental Prosopagnosia and “Super-Recognisers".

Abstract

The interplay between facial age and facial identity is evident from several scenarios experienced in daily life, such as when recognising a face several decades after the last exposure. However, the link between age and identity processing, and how age perception abilities might diverge in individuals with diferent face processing abilities, has scarcely been considered. Furthermore, the approach used to test age perception ability may also infuence outcome, but the efect of diferent paradigms on performance is not yet known. Across three studies, we compare superrecognisers (SRs), people with developmental prosopagnosia (DPs), and a group of neurotypical controls, on three age perception paradigms. There were no diferences on the numeric age estimation task (i.e. providing precise age estimates for a series of faces; Study 1), and numeric age estimation task with added noisedistortion to stimuli (Study 2). However, SRs were more accurate when instructed to classify ambient faces as either over or under the age of 18 compared to both DPs and controls (Study 3). Thus, there may be nuanced diferences in age processing which can be tapped into using separate paradigms; however, given that the diference is only with SRs it remains unclear to what extent these are linked to facial identity processing.