Own-age bias in face-name associations: Evidence from memory and visual attention in younger and older adults

Successfully learning and remembering people's names is a challenging memory task for adults of all ages, and this already difficult social skill worsens with age, even in normative "healthy" aging. The own-age bias, a type of in-group bias, could affect the difficulty of this task across age. Past evidence supports an own-age bias in face processing, wherein individuals preferably attend to and better recognize faces of members of their own age group. However, the own-age bias has not been examined previously in relation to explicit face-name associative encoding and subsequent name retrieval, despite the importance of this social skill. Using behavioral and eye-tracking methodology, this cross-sectional research investigated the own-age bias for name memory (recognition and recall) and visual attention (fixation count, looking time, and normalized pupil size) when learning novel face-name pairs. Younger adult (n = 90) and older adult (n = 84) participants completed a face-name association task that tested name memory for younger and older female and male faces, while eye-tracking data were recorded. The visual attention variables taken from the eye-tracking data showed significant age-of-face effects at both encoding and retrieval, but no overall own-age bias in attention. Both younger and older participants showed an own-age bias in name recall with better memory for names paired with faces of their own age, as compared to other-aged faces. This cross-over effect for name memory suggests that memory for information with high social and affective relevance to the individual may be relatively spared in aging, despite overall age-related declines in memory performance.