Own-Age Bias

Own-age bias is a finding in face recognition research that people are generally more accurate at recognizing and later identifying faces belonging to their own age group than faces belonging to a clearly different age group, a pattern documented across a range of face-memory studies and most extensively described as better recognition of same-age peers among younger adult participants. Researchers have proposed an explanation broadly parallel to the one offered for the analogous cross-race effect in face recognition, documented elsewhere in this section: people typically accumulate much greater everyday social contact and experience with faces from their own age group over the course of their lives, and this larger body of experience is thought to support the development of more finely tuned perceptual and memory processes specifically suited to telling apart individual faces within that heavily experienced category, an advantage that does not transfer as fully to faces from a much less frequently encountered age group. The effect has practical relevance for eyewitness identification, since it implies that an identification of a perpetrator from a noticeably different age group than the witness's own may on average be somewhat less reliable than an identification of a perpetrator closer to the witness's own age.