Facial Age Aftereffects Provide Some Evidence for Local Repulsion (But None for Re-Normalisation)
Face aftereffects can help adjudicate between theories of how facial attributes are encoded. O'Neil and colleagues (2014) compared age estimates for faces before and after adapting to young, middle-aged or old faces. They concluded that age aftereffects are best described as a simple re-normali...
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| Format: | Online |
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SAGE Publications
2015
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| Online Access: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4950025/ |
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pubmed-49500252017-03-15 Facial Age Aftereffects Provide Some Evidence for Local Repulsion (But None for Re-Normalisation) Storrs, Katherine R. Article Face aftereffects can help adjudicate between theories of how facial attributes are encoded. O'Neil and colleagues (2014) compared age estimates for faces before and after adapting to young, middle-aged or old faces. They concluded that age aftereffects are best described as a simple re-normalisation—e.g. after adapting to old faces, all faces look younger than they did initially. Here I argue that this conclusion is not substantiated by the reported data. The authors fit only a linear regression model, which captures the predictions of re-normalisation, but not alternative hypotheses such as local repulsion away from the adapted age. A second concern is that the authors analysed absolute age estimates after adaptation, as a function of baseline estimates, so goodness-of-fit measures primarily reflect the physical ages of test faces, rather than the impact of adaptation. When data are re-expressed as aftereffects and fit with a nonlinear “locally repulsive” model, this model performs equal to or better than a linear model in all adaptation conditions. Data in O'Neil et al. do not provide strong evidence for either re-normalisation or local repulsion in facial age aftereffects, but are more consistent with local repulsion (and exemplar-based encoding of facial age), contrary to the original report. SAGE Publications 2015-04-01 2015-04 /pmc/articles/PMC4950025/ /pubmed/28299168 http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/i0725jc Text en © 2015 KR Storrs Published under a Creative Commons Licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/aboutus/openaccess.htm). |
| repository_type |
Open Access Journal |
| institution_category |
Foreign Institution |
| institution |
US National Center for Biotechnology Information |
| building |
NCBI PubMed |
| collection |
Online Access |
| language |
English |
| format |
Online |
| author |
Storrs, Katherine R. |
| spellingShingle |
Storrs, Katherine R. Facial Age Aftereffects Provide Some Evidence for Local Repulsion (But None for Re-Normalisation) |
| author_facet |
Storrs, Katherine R. |
| author_sort |
Storrs, Katherine R. |
| title |
Facial Age Aftereffects Provide Some Evidence for Local Repulsion (But None for Re-Normalisation) |
| title_short |
Facial Age Aftereffects Provide Some Evidence for Local Repulsion (But None for Re-Normalisation) |
| title_full |
Facial Age Aftereffects Provide Some Evidence for Local Repulsion (But None for Re-Normalisation) |
| title_fullStr |
Facial Age Aftereffects Provide Some Evidence for Local Repulsion (But None for Re-Normalisation) |
| title_full_unstemmed |
Facial Age Aftereffects Provide Some Evidence for Local Repulsion (But None for Re-Normalisation) |
| title_sort |
facial age aftereffects provide some evidence for local repulsion (but none for re-normalisation) |
| description |
Face aftereffects can help adjudicate between theories of how facial attributes are encoded. O'Neil and colleagues (2014) compared age estimates for faces before and after adapting to young, middle-aged or old faces. They concluded that age aftereffects are best described as a simple re-normalisation—e.g. after adapting to old faces, all faces look younger than they did initially. Here I argue that this conclusion is not substantiated by the reported data. The authors fit only a linear regression model, which captures the predictions of re-normalisation, but not alternative hypotheses such as local repulsion away from the adapted age. A second concern is that the authors analysed absolute age estimates after adaptation, as a function of baseline estimates, so goodness-of-fit measures primarily reflect the physical ages of test faces, rather than the impact of adaptation. When data are re-expressed as aftereffects and fit with a nonlinear “locally repulsive” model, this model performs equal to or better than a linear model in all adaptation conditions. Data in O'Neil et al. do not provide strong evidence for either re-normalisation or local repulsion in facial age aftereffects, but are more consistent with local repulsion (and exemplar-based encoding of facial age), contrary to the original report. |
| publisher |
SAGE Publications |
| publishDate |
2015 |
| url |
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4950025/ |
| _version_ |
1613611468727517184 |