Holistic processing and reliance on global viewing strategies in older adults' face perception Bozana Meinhardt-Injac ⁎, Malte Persike, Günter Meinhardt Johannes Gutenberg University, Department of Psychology, Mainz, Germany abstract article info Article history: Received 24 August 2013 Received in revised form 19 May 2014 Accepted 1 June 2014 Available online 28 June 2014 PsycINFO classification codes: 2320 Sensory Perception 2820 Cognitive & Perceptual Development 2860 Gerontology Keywords: Face perception Object perception Aging Holistic processing Internal and external features There is increasing evidence that face recognition might be impaired in older adults, but it is unclear whether the impairment is truly perceptual, and face specific. In order to address this question we compared performance in same/different matching tasks with face and non-face objects (watches) among young (mean age 23.7) and older adults (mean age 70.4) using a context congruency paradigm (Meinhardt-Injac, Persike & Meinhardt, 2010, Meinhardt-Injac, Persike and Meinhardt, 2011a). Older adults were less accurate than young adults with both ob- ject classes, while face matching was notably impaired. Effects of context congruency and inversion, measured as the hallmarks of holistic processing, were equally strong in both age groups, and were found only for faces, but not for watches. The face specific decline in older adults revealed deficits in handling internal facial features, while young adults matched external and internal features equally well. Comparison with non-face stimuli showed that this decline was face specific, and did not concern processing of object features in general. Taken to- gether, the results indicate no age-related decline in the capabilities to process faces holistically. Rather, strong holistic effects, combined with a loss of precision in handling internal features indicate that older adults rely on global viewing strategies for faces. At the same time, access to the exact properties of inner face details be- comes restricted. © 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V. 1. Introduction There is increasing evidence that face recognition might be impaired in the elderly. This has been demonstrated in tasks requiring face detection (e.g., Norton, McBain, & Chen, 2009), face identification (e.g., Habak, Wilkinson, & Wilson, 2008) and emotion recognition (e.g., Calder et al., 2003). Some recent studies show that older adults perform more slowly and less accurately over a wide range of face perception tasks (Hildebrandt, Wilhelm, Herzmann, & Sommer, 2013; Hildebrandt, Wilhelm, Schmiedek, Herzmann, & Sommer, 2011). The data obtained in these studies also suggest that the structure of face-recognition abilities (i.e., face perception, face memory, speed of face cognition) remains rela- tively age-invariant through the adult life-span, and are clearly distinct from latent factors of object cognition (measured with four indicators for perception and one for memory — for more details see Hildebrandt et al., 2013; Wilhelm et al., 2010). This suggests that the mechanisms involved in face perception remain unaffected in nature, but become less efficient with increasing age. Not just face perception abilities seem to decline with age, but also general cognitive efficiency (e.g., Eppinger, Kray, Mecklinger, & John, 2007; Grady & Craik, 2000; Li, Lindenberger, & Sikström, 2001; Störmer, Li, Heekeren, & Lindenberger, 2013). In the light of these find- ings it is important to disentangle the decrease in general cognitive functioning (i.e., executive control, working memory, or selective atten- tion) from the decrease of face specific holistic perception in older adults (Hildebrandt et al., 2010, 2013). Holistic perception means that faces are perceived and remembered as unparsed perceptual wholes (i.e., as a “Gestalt”). As a consequence, the perceptual wholes of faces cannot be broken down into parts without impeding perception and re- membering of facial stimuli. Accordingly, experimental paradigms used to test holistic face processing measure how the perception of face parts is affected by changing the face context. For example, the composite ef- fect (Hole, 1994; Young, Hellawell, & Hay, 1987) shows that it is more difficult to judge the identity of the upper face halves of a face pair when the lower face halves disagree. Misaligning both halves cancels the effect and allows the observer to compare the upper halves inde- pendent of interference from the lower halves. The part-whole effect shows that a facial feature (e.g., a nose) is much better identified when it is embedded in the context of a face that has previously been viewed, compared to seeing this face part in isolation (Farah, Tanaka, & Drain, 1995; Tanaka & Farah, 1993). Both the composite effect and the part-to-whole effect are, however, limited to upright faces. Present- ing faces upside down strongly reduces holistic effects (Xu & Tanaka, 2013). This points to the influence of expertise in face processing, since faces are learned usually in the upright orientation (Diamond & Carey, 1986). Acta Psychologica 151 (2014) 155–163 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Department of Psychology, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Binger Strasse 14-16, 55122 Mainz, Germany. E-mail address: meinharb@mail.uni-mainz.de (B. Meinhardt-Injac). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2014.06.001 0001-6918/© 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Acta Psychologica journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/ locate/actpsy