The own-age bias (OAB) has been proposed to be caused by perceptual expertise and/or social-cognitive mechanisms. Investigations into the role of social cognition have, however, yielded mixed results. One reason for this might be the tendency for research to focus on the OAB in young adults, between young and older adult faces where other-age individuation experience is low. To explore whether social-cognitive manipulations may be successful when observers have sufficient other-age individuation experience, we examined biases involving middle-aged other-age faces and the influence of a context manipulation. Across four experiments, young adult participants were presented with middle-aged faces alongside young or older adult faces to remember. We predicted that in contexts where middle-aged faces were positioned as other-age faces (alongside young adult faces), recognition performance would be worse than when they were positioned as relative own-age faces (alongside older adult faces). However, the context manipulations did not moderate middle age face recognition. This suggests that past findings that context does not change other-age face recognition holds for other-age faces for which observers have higher individuation experience. These findings are consistent with a perceptual expertise account of the OAB but more investigation of the generality of these results is required.

中文翻译：

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稳定的中年人脸识别：没有调节跨上下文的自岁偏见

自我年龄偏见 (OAB) 被认为是由感知专业知识和/或社会认知机制引起的。然而，对社会认知作用的调查产生了不同的结果。造成这种情况的一个原因可能是研究倾向于关注年轻人的 OAB，在其他年龄个体化经验较低的年轻人和老年人之间。为了探索当观察者有足够的其他年龄个体化经验时社会认知操纵是否可能成功，我们检查了涉及中年其他年龄面孔的偏见和上下文操纵的影响。在四项实验中，年轻的成年参与者被展示了中年面孔以及年轻或年长的面孔以供记住。我们预测，在中年人脸被定位为其他年龄人脸（与年轻成人脸一起）的情况下，识别性能将比将它们定位为相对同龄人脸（与老年人脸一起）时更差。然而，上下文操作并没有缓和中年人脸识别。这表明，过去关于环境不会改变其他年龄人脸识别的研究结果适用于观察者具有更高个性化经验的其他年龄人脸。这些发现与 OAB 的感知专业知识一致，但需要对这些结果的普遍性进行更多调查。上下文操作并没有缓和中年人脸识别。这表明，过去关于环境不会改变其他年龄人脸识别的研究结果适用于观察者具有更高个性化经验的其他年龄人脸。这些发现与 OAB 的感知专业知识一致，但需要对这些结果的普遍性进行更多调查。上下文操作并没有缓和中年人脸识别。这表明，背景不会改变其他年龄人脸识别的过去发现适用于观察者具有更高个性化经验的其他年龄人脸。这些发现与 OAB 的感知专业知识一致，但需要对这些结果的普遍性进行更多调查。