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Updated: Jan 18, 2026

Perceptual and Category Processing of the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis' Dimension of Human Likeness: Some Methodological Issues
Published on: June 3, 2013
From Emotional Detection of Dynamic Stimuli to Facial Identity Recognition: Age Difference in the Processing of
Emanuela Bartolini1, Giulia Prete2, Irene Ceccato2
1Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Sciences, "G. d'Annunzio" University of Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy.
Abstract:
Age-related differences in facial identity recognition and emotion categorization are well established, but whether these differences extend to dynamic stimuli remains underexplored. We compared younger and older adults' performances in dynamic emotion categorization (phase 1) and identity recognition (phase 2) tasks, incorporating different types of facial occlusion to test their influence on both tasks. Stimuli included whole faces and two types of occlusion (surgical masks, white rectangles). In phase 1, participants observed videos of neutral expressions transitioning to emotional ones and categorized the emerging emotion. In phase 2, static neutral faces were judged as either previously seen or new. Occlusion impaired performances in both groups, with older adults struggling more in emotion categorization. Age had no effect on identity recognition, and occluded faces were better remembered than whole faces. The findings highlight the interplay between emotion processing and identity recognition, stressing the importance of using dynamic stimuli in aging research.
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