Image Reconstruction Reveals the Impact of Aging on Face Perception

Extensive work has demonstrated a decline in face recognition abilities associated with healthy aging. To date, however, there has been limited insight into the nature and the extent of aging-related alterations in internal face representations. Here, we sought to address these issues by using an image reconstruction approach that capitalizes on the structure of behavioral data to reveal the pictorial content of visual representations. To this end, healthy young and older adults provided similarity judgments with pairs of face images. Facial shape and surface features were subsequently derived from the structure of the data for each participant and combined into image reconstructions of facial appearance. Our findings revealed that image reconstruction was successful for every participant, irrespective of age. However, reconstruction accuracies of shape and surface information were lower for older individuals than young individuals. Specifically, facial features diagnostic for face perception, such as eye shape and skin tone, were reconstructed poorly in older adults relative to young adults. At the same time, we found that age-related effects only accounted for a relatively small proportion of individual variability in face representations. Thus, our results provide novel insight into age-related changes in visual perception, they account for the decline in facial recognition occurring with age and they demonstrate the utility of image reconstruction to uncovering internal representations across a variety of populations.