Impaired sensitivity to spatial configurations in healthy aging

Healthy aging is associated with decline in social, emotion, and identity perception, which is frequently attributed to deterioration of structures involved in social inference. It is believed that this decline is unlikely to be a result of perceptual aberrations due to intact (corrected) visual acuity. Nevertheless, the present studies examine whether more particular perceptual aberrations may be present in healthy aging, that could in principle contribute to such difficulties. The present study examined the possibility that particular deficits in configural processing impair the perception of faces in healthy aging. Across two signal detection experiments, we required a group of healthy older adults and matched younger adults to detect changes in images of faces that could differ either at the local, featural level, or in configuration of these features. In support of our hypothesis, older adults were particularly impaired in detecting configural changes, relative to detecting changes in features. The impairments were found for both upright and inverted faces and were similar in a task with images of inanimate objects (houses). Drift diffusion modelling suggested that this decline related to reduced evidence accumulation rather than a ten-dency to make configural judgments based on less evidence. These findings indicate that domain-general problems processing configural information contribute to the difficulties with face processing in healthy aging, and may in principle contribute to a range of higher -level social difficulties -with implications also for other groups exhibiting similar patterns in perception and understanding.(c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

Healthy aging is associated with decline in social, emotion, and identity perception, which may be attributed to specific deficits in configural processing. Two signal detection experiments showed that healthy older adults were particularly impaired in detecting configural changes in faces, compared to detecting changes in features. These findings indicate that problems in processing configural information contribute to the difficulties in face processing in healthy aging.