The own-age bias arises from the adjustment of utilizing holistic and featural information

Focused on the processing mechanisms underlying this own-age bias, a unique experimental task using a variable viewing position paradigm (VVPP) was employed to understand if participants relied on holistic or feature information for face recognition by instructing them to gaze at either the left or right eye of a target face and choose the target face among four presented faces: the target face (the correct face for identification), a face with peripheral congruency but central incongruency (an interfering face with the correct holistic information), a face with peripheral incongruency but central congruency (an interfering face with the correct feature information), and a completely incongruent face.

College student participants were tested on upright and inverted faces of different ages (20-year-old adults and 4-year-old children).