Does age-dynamic movement accelerate facial age impression? Perception of age from facial movement: Studies of Japanese women

We form impressions of others by observing their constant and dynamically-shifting facial expressions during conversation and other daily life activities. However, conventional aging research has mainly considered the changing characteristics of the skin, such as wrinkles and age-spots, within very limited states of static faces. In order to elucidate the range of aging impressions that we make in daily life, it is necessary to consider the effects of facial movement. This study investigated the effects of facial movement on age impressions. An age perception test using Japanese women as face models was employed to verify the effects of the models’ age-dependent facial movements on age impression in 112 participants (all women, aged 20–49 years) as observers. Further, the observers’ gaze was analyzed to identify the facial areas of interests during age perception. The results showed that cheek movement affects age impressions, and that the impressions increase depending on the model’s age. These findings will facilitate the development of new means of provoking a more youthful impression by approaching anti-aging from a different viewpoint of facial movement.

Contextual effects in age perception and the own-age bias

Our judgement of certain facial characteristics such as emotion, attractiveness or age, is affected by context. Faces that are flanked by younger faces, for example, are perceived as being younger, whereas faces flanked by older faces are perceived as being older. Here, we investigated whether contextual effects in age perception are mediated by an own age bias. On each trial, a target face was presented on the screen, which was flanked by two faces. Flanker faces were either identical to the target face, were 10 years younger or 10 years older than the target face. We asked forty older (64-69 years) and forty-three younger adults (24-29) to estimate the age of the target face.Our results replicate previous studies and showed that context affects age estimation of faces flanked by target faces of different ages. These context effects were more pronounced for younger compared to older flankers but present across both tested age groups. An own-age bias was observed for unflanked faces such that older adults had larger estimation errors for younger faces compared to older faces and younger adults. Flanker effects, however, were not mediated by an own-age bias. It is likely that the increased effect of younger flankers is due to mechanisms related to perceptual averaging.

THE AGE OF DESIGN - HOW USERS PERCEIVE THE CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER WITHIN AUTOMOBILE GENERATIONS

The vehicle exterior design conveys a variety of visual information. Among these are the brand identity, assumed characteristics, and the vehicle's age or newness. While previous research focusses mainly on the first two attributes, we broaden the perspective by examining the age perception for vehicle model portfolios across brands.Information of age is embedded not only in branding but also in the entirety of a vehicle's exterior design features. Therefore, this paper examines how participants of a self-reported study perceive individual models inside successive product portfolios without typical branding. The stimulus patterns were derived from 12 different series of BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi and edited accordingly. A total of 67 models from the years 1968 to 2019 were presented and evaluated in terms of perceived age, model and brand recognition.The results show that most vehicles are perceived as newer than their actual age, successive model generations are clearly distinguishable and participants were able to sort all models in their correct chronological order. Finally, design-related age perception and knowledge-based age perception are introduced as possible underlying concepts of the visual perception of product age.

The role of familiarity on within-person age judgements from voices

Listeners can perceive a person’s age from their voice with good accuracy. Studies have usually established this by asking listeners to directly estimate the age of unfamiliar voices. The recordings used mostly include cross-sectional samples of voices, including a people of different ages to cover the age range of interest. Such cross-sectional samples likely not only include cues to age in the sound of the voice but also socio-phonetic cues, encoded in how a person speaks. How accuracy is affected when minimising socio-phonetic cues by sampling the same voice at different timepoints remains largely unknown. Similarly, with the voices in age perception studies being usually unfamiliar to listeners, it is unclear how familiarity with a voice affects age perception. We asked listeners who were either familiar or unfamiliar with a set of voices to complete an age discrimination task: Listeners heard two recordings of the same person’s voice, recorded 15 years apart, and were asked to indicate in which recording the person was younger. Accuracy for both familiar and unfamiliar listeners was above chance. While familiarity advantages were apparent, accuracy was not particularly high: Familiar and unfamiliar listeners were correct for 68.2% and 62.7% of trials respectively (chance = 50%). Familiarity furthermore interacted with the voices included. Overall, our findings indicate that age perception from voices is not a trivial task at all times – even when listeners are familiar with a voice. We discuss our findings in light of how reliable voice may be as a signal for age.

Asymmetric contextual effects in age perception

Perception is context dependent. For example, the perceived orientation of a bar changes depending on the presence of oriented bars around it. Contextual effects have also been demonstrated for more complex judgements, such as facial attractiveness or expression, although it remains unclear how these contextual facial effects depend on the types of faces surrounding the target face. To examine this, we measured the perceived age (a quantifiable measure) of a target face in the presence of differently aged faces in the surround. Using a unique database of standardized passport photos, participants were asked to estimate the age of a target face which was viewed either on its own or surrounded by two different identity flanker faces. The flanker faces were either both younger or both older than the target face, with different age offsets between flankers and targets of ±5, ±10, ±15, ±20 years. We find that when a target face is surrounded by younger faces, it systematically appears younger than when viewed on its own, and when it is surrounded by older faces, it systematically appears older than when viewed on its own. Surprisingly, we find that the magnitude of the flanker effects on perceived age of the target is asymmetric with younger flankers having a greater influence than older flankers, a result that may reflect the participants' own-age bias, since all participants were young. This result holds irrespective of gender or race of the faces and is consistent with averaging.

Herontic Communication: A Sociolinguistic Look at the Problem

The article reveals the features of the speech transformations of the elderly people associated with the changes in both biological and social characters. The stereotypes of age perception, ageism as a practice in communicating with the elderly, «secondary babbling» are considered. The practical recommendations aimed at removing barriers in interaction with an elderly person and their relevance in the field of social services for this category of citizens are highlighted.

Parameter-Specific Morphing Reveals Contributions of Timbre and Fundamental Frequency Cues to the Perception of Voice Gender and Age in Cochlear Implant Users

Purpose Using naturalistic synthesized speech, we determined the relative importance of acoustic cues in voice gender and age perception in cochlear implant (CI) users. Method We investigated 28 CI users' abilities to utilize fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre in perceiving voice gender (Experiment 1) and vocal age (Experiment 2). Parameter-specific voice morphing was used to selectively control acoustic cues (F0; time; timbre, i.e., formant frequencies, spectral-level information, and aperiodicity, as defined in TANDEM-STRAIGHT) in voice stimuli. Individual differences in CI users' performance were quantified via deviations from the mean performance of 19 normal-hearing (NH) listeners. Results CI users' gender perception seemed exclusively based on F0, whereas NH listeners efficiently used timbre. For age perception, timbre was more informative than F0 for both groups, with minor contributions of temporal cues. While a few CI users performed comparable to NH listeners overall, others were at chance. Separate analyses confirmed that even high-performing CI users classified gender almost exclusively based on F0. While high performers could discriminate age in male and female voices, low performers were close to chance overall but used F0 as a misleading cue to age (classifying female voices as young and male voices as old). Satisfaction with CI generally correlated with performance in age perception. Conclusions We confirmed that CI users' gender classification is mainly based on F0. However, high performers could make reasonable usage of timbre cues in age perception. Overall, parameter-specific morphing can serve to objectively assess individual profiles of CI users' abilities to perceive nonverbal social-communicative vocal signals.