Social Engineering Blogs

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Facial Age and Recognition

Sometimes it is very important to evaluate age based on someone’s face alone, but this can be quite tricky.

This is actually a surprisingly pressing issue as age is relevant in all sorts of commercial, social, or political contexts. While it seems intuitive that we should be able to recognize people’s ages pretty easily, this has been challenged, if not refuted, by emerging research. For instance, in a series of experiments by Dr. Colin Clifford and his team, it appears that people tend to be incredibly bad at accurately judging age.

Not only is it often awkward or inconvenient to not be able to judge someone’s age, but age also undergirds a great deal of social evaluations. Group identification, emotional evaluations, and other assorted judgments are heavily determined by our perceptions of age, as should not be surprising to most readers.

Given the importance of age evaluations in social interactions, Dr. Clifford’s team attempted to expose experimental participants to a massive database of passport photographs, tasking them with estimating the age of the person.

The experimental design was relatively simple; though employing some complicated measures to avoid sampling biases and other confounding factors. Essentially, each of the 84 participants was asked to identify the age of almost 400 participants, ranging greatly in age and across gender.

Overall, they detected certain systemically incorrect estimations across the participants. Namely, young faces tended to be seen as older, while older faces tended to be seen as younger. This was actually in line with some previous research that found that age estimations tend to skew to middle aged faces.

Importantly, perceptions of age tended to by heavily impacted by the face most recently seen. This can take the form of bias related to gender, attractiveness, or facial expression. While this research sought to control for that, Dr. Clifford did find that, without controls, such dependency would have significant impacts on evaluations.

One interesting aspect of this path dependency is the impact that previous assessments of age have. After coding multiple faces as being young, participants were more likely to gauge subsequent pictures as younger than they were. This is particularly notable given that that is the opposite of the expected and normal bias of skewing towards middle aged assessments.

Dr. Clifford’s work not only helps demonstrate the challenges of accurately gauging age but also helps shed light on how we can be influenced by seeing other faces. For instance, a bartender who is used to seeing older faces might be more likely to overestimate a younger customer’s age.

While you may not be much better at age estimation than the average participant, it is helpful to keep these considerations in mind. Knowing a person’s age can be a helpful tool in correctly reading their emotions, but it can also help us gauge whether that person is a threat in various social situations.

Threat in the Golden Years

As we age, we tend to look more fondly on the world and on our memories, but does that mean we can’t detect threat?

While a great deal of research indicates that older individuals tend to focus on pleasurable or non-threatening aspects of experience and memories, it is unclear whether this means they are less able to recognize threating behaviors in other individuals. This is what Drs. Mara Mather and Marisa Knight sought to determine in a 2006 article.

This question tries to get at even deeper questions as to how the brain processes threatening information. Because our threat detection is mediated by the brain’s amygdala, perhaps this functions less effectively as we age. Alternatively, this may be due to “strategic processing” where older individuals’ brains use positive inclinations to better process information.

In order to critically evaluate this question, both young and older participants were recruited for an experimental study, asking preliminary questions to confirm that the older participants did tend to experience a more positive affect. Each participant was then exposed to a selection of nine facial images.

Half of the participants were only shown neutral faces, while another half had one emotional expression mixed into these neutral faces. Some of these treatment faces were threatening, but others were sad or friendly. After being exposed to the treatment, each individual was asked to identify whether the face appeared to be threatening.

Contrary to some of the theoretical expectations, age seemed to make no impact on accurate identification. They were also able to recognize threatening faces more quickly, confirming previous research, but age did not seem to make a difference here.

So, what does this tell us about our ability to detect threat? And more specifically, how does this help us do so?

First, it tells us that threat detection is a very fundamental underlying process in our brains. While a great deal of cognitive processes change as we age, it is notable that this one does not seem to.

Second, the almost instantaneous nature of threat detection not only underscores its fundamental role but also gives us practical tips on how to detect threat. Just like facial recognition, our brain automatically processes faces and gives us certain intuitions.

However, while it is good to trust these intuitions, they might not always be accurate. Our brains are pretty incredible, but they are not infallible. This is a great reason to get real, professional training to teach our brain what to look for. This can make an already incredible skill even more formidable!