Perceptual information for the age level of faces as a higher order invariant of growth

Previous work supports the hypothesis that cardioidal strain, a nonlinear topological transformation, offers a plausible mathematical model for the perceived global changes in human craniofacial morphology due to growth. Experiment 1 examined the generality of the effect of this growth transformation on relative age judgments by applying it to profiles of a dog, bird, and monkey. Experiment 2 investigated the abstractness of this transformation by looking at its effect on perceived age level of a Volkswagen "Beetle." In both experiments, cardioidal strain resulted in changes in the perceived age of the nonhuman profiles that were similar to those produced on human faces in earlier work. A second transformation, affine shear, failed to produce as significant an effect on perceived age as cardioidal strain when applied to the same structures. Because cardioidal strain produces changes in structures that do not share an isomorphism of rigid (Euclidian) local features or rigid feature configurations, this transformation seems both sufficiently general and abstract to specify what J.J. Gibson has called a "higher-order invariant of perceptual information.