title: Aging affects sex categorization of male and female faces in opposite ways.
abstract: Faces are rich in social information; they easily give away a person's sex, approximate age, feelings, or focus of attention. Past research has mostly focused on investigating the distinct facial signals and perceptual mechanisms that allow us to categorize faces on these individual dimensions. It is less well understood how the different kinds of facial information interact. Here we investigated how the age of a face affects the ease with which young and older adults categorize its sex. Disconfirming everyday intuition, we showed that sex categorization is not generally hampered for older faces. Although categorization of female faces took progressively more time with increasing age, the opposite was found for male faces (Experiment 1). Differential effects of stimulus blurring and inversion for male and female faces of different ages (Experiment 2) strongly suggest one feature as a crucial mediator of the interdependence of age and sex perception - skin texture.
authors.affiliation: ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, School of Psychology, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia; DFG Research Unit Person Perception, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Leutragraben 1, 07743 Jena, Germany. Electronic address: nadine.kloth@uwa.edu.au.
authors.forename: Nadine
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Kloth
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Am Steiger 3/1, 07743 Jena, Germany. Electronic address: dammmadeleine@aol.com.
authors.forename: Madeleine
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Damm
authors.affiliation: ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, School of Psychology, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia; DFG Research Unit Person Perception, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Leutragraben 1, 07743 Jena, Germany; Department of Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Am Steiger 3/1, 07743 Jena, Germany. Electronic address: stefan.schweinberger@uni-jena.de.
authors.forename: Stefan R
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Schweinberger
authors.affiliation: DFG Research Unit Person Perception, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Leutragraben 1, 07743 Jena, Germany; Department of Psychology, Durham University, Queen's Campus, E007 Wolfson Building, Stockton on Tees TS17 6BH, United Kingdom. Electronic address: holger.wiese@durham.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Holger
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Wiese
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012727:Sex Characteristics; D012867:Skin; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Aging; Categorization; Face perception; Skin texture; Social perception