Age-related differences in face recognition: Neural correlates of repetition and semantic priming in young and older adults

Wiese, Holger; Komes, Jessica; Tuettenberg, Simone; Leidinger, Jana; Schweinberger, Stefan R.

Abstract

Difficulties in person recognition are among the common complaints associated with cognitive ageing. The present series of experiments therefore investigated face and person recognition in young and older adults. We examined how within-domain and cross-domain repetition as well as semantic priming affect familiar face recognition, and analyzed both behavioural and event-related brain potential (ERP) measures to identify specific processing stages of age-related deficits. During repetition priming (Experiments 1 and 2), we observed evidence of an age-related deficit in behavioural priming, and clear reductions of both the N250r and the N400 ERP priming effects in older participants. At the same time, both semantic priming (Experiment 3) and the associated N400 ERP effect of semantic priming were largely intact in older adults. We suggest that ageing selectively affects the access to domain-general representations of familiar people via bottom-up perceptual processing units. At the same time, accessing domain-general representations via top-down semantic units seems to be relatively preserved in older adults.

Citation

Wiese, H., Komes, J., Tuettenberg, S., Leidinger, J., & Schweinberger, S. R. (2017). Age-related differences in face recognition: Neural correlates of repetition and semantic priming in young and older adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 43(8), 1254-1273. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000380

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 17, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Feb 27, 2017
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2017
• Deposit Date: Jan 19, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 20, 2017
• Journal: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
• Print ISSN: 0278-7393
• Electronic ISSN: 1939-1285
• Publisher: American Psychological Association
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 43
• Issue: 8
• Pages: 1254-1273
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000380
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1387958