title: Adding years to your life (or at least looking like it): a simple normalization underlies adaptation to facial age.
abstract: Adaptation has been widely used to probe how experience shapes the visual encoding of faces, but the pattern of perceptual changes produced by adaptation and the neural mechanisms these imply remain poorly characterized. We explored how adaptation alters the perceived age of faces, a fundamental facial attribute which can uniquely and reliably be scaled by observers. This allowed us to measure how adaptation to one age level affected the full continuum of perceived ages. Participants guessed the ages of faces ranging from 18-89, before or after adapting to a different set of faces composed of younger, older, or middle-aged adults. Adapting to young or old faces induced opposite linear shifts in perceived age that were independent of the model's age. Specifically, after adapting to younger or older faces, faces of all ages appeared 2 to 3 years older or younger, respectively. In contrast, middle-aged adaptors induced no aftereffects. This pattern suggests that adaptation leads to a simple and uniform renormalization of age perception, and is consistent with a norm-based neural code for the mechanisms mediating the perception of facial age.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada, United States of America.
authors.forename: Sean F
authors.initials: SF
authors.lastname: O'Neil
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada, United States of America.
authors.forename: Amy
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mac
authors.affiliation: ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.
authors.forename: Gillian
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Rhodes
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada, United States of America; ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.
authors.forename: Michael A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Webster
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D005366:Figural Aftereffect; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D055815:Young Adult