Remembering facial age: Assimilation in memory toward categories of ‘Young’ and ‘Old’

When we meet someone, we make all sorts of judgments based on their age. But how is a person’s age represented in the mind at all: do we remember someone as younger, or older, than they actually were? In a matching-from-memory task, observers briefly saw a target face which was either Young (30 years old) or Old (60 years old). Afterward, they saw two new decoy faces — 10 years younger, and 10 years older than the target. Observers were strongly biased to match Young targets to younger decoys, and Old targets to older decoys. These biases held across artificially aged and real faces, regardless of observers’ own age, and even when the decoys’ races and genders differed from that of the target — suggesting that a common mechanism underlies memory for facial age across races and genders. Additional experiments indicated that these memory biases reflect assimilation toward visual category centers, rather than toward extremes. Thus, social categories of ‘young’ and ‘old’ shape and distort our memories of faces.