Healthy aging is associated with impairments in face recognition. While earlier research suggests that these impairments arise during memory retrieval, more recent findings suggest that earlier mechanisms, at the perceptual stage, may also be at play. However, results are often inconsistent and very few studies have included a non-face control stimulus to facilitate interpretation of results with respect to the implication of specialized face mechanisms vs. general cognitive factors. To address these issues, P100, N170 and P200 event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured during processing of faces and watches. For faces, age-related differences were found for P100, N170 and P200 ERPs. For watches, age-related differences were found for N170 and P200 ERPs. Older adults showed less selective and less lateralized N170 responses to faces, suggesting that ERPs can detect age-related de-differentiation of specialized face networks. We conclude that age-related impairments in face recognition arise in part from difficulties in the earliest perceptual stages of visual information processing. A working model is presented based on coarse-to-fine analysis of visually similar exemplars.

健康老龄化与人脸识别障碍有关。虽然早期的研究表明这些障碍是在记忆提取过程中出现的，但最近的研究结果表明，在感知阶段，早期的机制也可能在起作用。然而，结果往往不一致，很少有研究包括非面部控制刺激，以促进对特殊面部机制与一般认知因素的含义的结果的解释。为了解决这些问题，在处理面部和手表期间测量了 P100、N170 和 P200 事件相关电位 (ERP)。对于面部，发现 P100、N170 和 P200 ERP 的年龄相关差异。对于手表，发现 N170 和 P200 ERP 存在与年龄相关的差异。老年人对面部表现出较少的选择性和较少的侧向 N170 反应，表明 ERP 可以检测到专门面部网络的与年龄相关的去分化。我们得出结论，人脸识别中与年龄相关的障碍部分是由于视觉信息处理的最早感知阶段的困难。基于对视觉相似示例的粗到细分析，提出了一种工作模型。