title: Facial age after-effects show partial identity invariance and transfer from hands to faces.
abstract: Age imparts long-term dynamic changes to faces: how these are represented in the human visual system has seldom been investigated. We investigated facial age after-effects using a perceptual bias paradigm, and studied the ability of adaptation to transfer across face identity, visual stimuli and sensory modality, as has been done for the short-term dynamic changes of facial expression. Age after-effects were reduced but still significant when the identity of the face was changed between the adapting and test stimuli, as we had found for expression after-effects, suggesting identity-specific and identity-invariant components of age after-effects. Although body silhouettes and greyscale body images failed to generate age after-effects in faces, we did find cross-stimulus transfer of age adaptation from hands to faces. There was no cross-modal transfer of after-effects from voices to faces. These findings confirm that face adaptation has components that cannot be explained by low-level image-based effects but involve high-level representations that may be influenced by related visual semantic information.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medicine (Neurology), University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
authors.forename: Michelle
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lai
authors.forename: Ipek
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Oruç
authors.forename: Jason J S
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Barton
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D005145:Face / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005366:Figural Aftereffect / Q000502:physiology*; D006225:Hand / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D012938:Social Perception; D014831:Voice