The hippocampus shows an own-age bias during unfamiliar face viewing
AbstractThe present study investigated the neural correlates of the own-age bias for face recognition in a repetition suppression paradigm. Healthy young and older adults viewed upright and inverted unfamiliar faces. Some of the upright faces were repeated following one of two delays (lag 0 or lag 11). Repetition suppression effects were observed in bilateral fusiform cortex, with no evidence of an own-age bias. By contrast, the right anterior hippocampus showed an own-age bias (greater activity for own- than other-age faces) when viewing an unfamiliar face for the first time. Given the importance of the hippocampus to episodic memory encoding, we conjecture that the increased hippocampal activity for own-age relative to other-age faces reflects differential engagement of neural processes supporting the episodic encoding of faces and might provide insight into the processes giving rise to own-age biases in face recognition memory.