Abstract
To examine the role of configurational information and featural information in the facial age-perception, two experiments were performed. The stimuli were made from 50 facial images of Japanese female from 20s to 60s. In experiment 1, two kinds of facial images were made: the faces without hair(FWH) and the faces without hair and facial outline(FWHO). These were presented randomly upright or upside-down. The participants estimated ages for these stimuli and original facial images and the differences between these two estimations were analyzed as dependent variables. The result of experiment 1 showed that the age estimations of FWH were better than FWHO, and upright images were better than upside-down images. The no-outline effects are relatively strong in younger faces and the upside-down effects are strong in older faces. In experiment 2, the contributions of eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth were compared. For 20s' and 30s' facial images, the eyes took an important role in the age perception, whereas for 40s' and 50s' nose was important. Farah et. al.(1998) suggested configurational information is important in the recognition of facial identity. According to Jung and Park(2004), featural information plays an important role in the recognition of facial expression. The results of this study show that both featural information and configurational information of face is used in the age perception. These imply that age perception is related to both channel processing invariant properties and channel processing changeable properties of face.
This work was supported by Korea Research Foundation Grant(KRF-2005-130-HM0004).