With age comes representational wisdom in social signals.

ABSTRACT: In an increasingly aging society, age has become a foundational dimension of social grouping broadly targeted by advertising and governmental policies. However, perception of old age induces mainly strong negative social biases. To characterize their cognitive and perceptual foundations, we modeled the mental representations of faces associated with three age groups (young age, middle age, and old age), in younger and older participants. We then validated the accuracy of each mental representation of age with independent validators. Using statistical image processing, we identified the features of mental representations that predict perceived age. Here, we show that whereas younger people mentally dichotomize aging into two groups, themselves (younger) and others (older), older participant

SUBMITTER: van Rijsbergen N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4251953 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature