| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 心理學研究所 === 102 === Population aging is a phenomenon that many countries have faced nowadays and in the near future. To a person, aging leads to deteriorations both in physical strength and mental capabilities, including most of the cognitive functions. The ability to recognize faces develops very early for human being. However, this seemingly innate ability is not avoiding from cognitive aging. Despite that there is a general trend of deterioration in recognizing faces, Perfect and Moon (2005) found that old adults recognize the face of a person better if the person is from their age group. This effect is called own-age bias (OAB). Unfortunately, there is only a few research studying this effect, and results from these studies are inconsistent. The present study aims to investigate, (A) the abilities of older adults in recognizing unfamiliar young and old faces, and (B) the reliability of OAB effect. Experiment 1 asked a group of older and a group of young adults to remember some photos of young and older adults’ faces. The results of experiment 1 showed that older adults performed much worse than young ones, and that there was no OAB in memorizing “old” faces. In Experiment 2, an OAB effect was observed for the older adults when the difficulty of facial recognition task was reduced by using fewer stimuli and longer studying time.
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