Perceived age is distorted in visual memory: A phenomenon of “forward” and “backward” aging for faces

When we meet someone, we quickly make judgments about them based on how old they look (e.g. about their physical abilities, cognitive abilities and personality traits). But how is a person’s age represented in the mind in the first place? Do we remember certain people as younger, or as older, than they actually were? One possibility is that representations of facial age exhibit ‘representational momentum’, such that observers remember a face as older than it actually was. Another possibility is that our memory for facial age is biased towards the average of the faces that we have seen previously, in which case observers might misremember faces as closer to middle age. To explore these possibilities, we ran three experiments which tested participants’ memory for the age of a briefly presented face. Participants saw a target face which was either young (30 years old) or old (60 years old). Subsequently, they saw two new faces – one 10 years younger and another 10 years older than the target. Participants selected the face that matched the target. Contrary to our initial predictions, we did not find a bias to remember faces as older, or as closer to middle age. Instead, a distinct pattern emerged — observers were biased to remember young targets as younger (i.e. ‘backward aging’), and old targets as older (i.e. ‘forward aging’). Remarkably, these biases held across sexes (male, female) and races (asian, black, white) of the target face, across artificially-aged and real faces, and regardless of the observers’ own age. Further, the results persisted even when the decoys’ identities differed from that of the target face — suggesting that this bias operates over abstract representations of age. Thus, social categories of ‘young’ and ‘old’ shape and distort our visual memories of faces.