Impaired sensitivity to spatial configurations in healthy aging.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psychology of Aging
• Perception

Background:

• Healthy aging often involves declines in social perception, typically linked to neural changes.
• Previous assumptions suggested intact visual acuity prevents perceptual aberrations as a cause.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if specific perceptual aberrations, particularly in configural processing, impair face perception in healthy aging.
• To determine if these deficits contribute to broader social cognition challenges.

Main Methods:

• Two signal detection experiments comparing healthy older and younger adults.
• Task involved detecting changes in faces at local featural or configural levels.
• Drift diffusion modeling analyzed decision-making processes.

Main Results:

• Older adults were significantly impaired in detecting configural changes compared to featural changes.
• Deficits were observed for both upright and inverted faces, and also for houses.
• Drift diffusion modeling indicated reduced evidence accumulation, not a bias towards making judgments.

Conclusions:

• Domain-general configural processing deficits contribute to impaired face perception in healthy aging.
• These findings suggest a potential mechanism for age-related social cognition difficulties.
• Implications extend to other groups with similar perceptual processing patterns.