Age gets in my eyes

October 27, 2008 2:03 AM

How is it that as you grow older your perception of people's faces as being roughly in your age group grows with it?

I am curious about what goes on in our minds (psychologically rather than neurologically) that enables us to perceive people as our peers in terms of age by looking at their faces.

I've noticed as I get older it becomes more noticeable, particularly when encountering authority figures such as police officers, GPs, teachers etc. some of whom strike me as still wet behind the ears, bloody young whippersnippers who nevertheless -- usually -- seem to know what they're talking about.

My online searches mostly resulted in research papers covering very specific aspects of facial age perception you need to purchase whereas I'm more interested in a global overview of the current state of play or, perhaps, an explanation why my assumption is completely misguided.

posted by =^^= to science & nature (9 comments total)

I haven't got any references, but here's a theory of my own. I think we have two age-assessing systems which run in parallel; one gives an objective biological verdict based on wrinkliness, white hair, etc; the other assesses the role and behaviour, coming up with over-riding judgements like 'responsible co-eval', 'elderly', and 'juvenile'.

On first sight, you haven't had chance to assess role and behaviour, so you get a straight biological assessment. With regular friends and associates, your knowledge of their behaviour keeps them assessed as 'co-eval', but if you meet someone you knew 20 years ago, they'll look old for a while until you get used to them in their normal role and behaviour again. Presumably the young whippersnappers would gradually cease to seem young if you worked with them over a period.

Or rather, their youth would become less salient, not invisible. I don't know whether you ever saw the classic Dennis Potter play 'Blue Rememberd Hills', which was entirely about children, but played by adults. After a few minutes of initial strangeness, you accepted them as children, though their age was not invisible. I know I found myself thinking things like 'Oh, the bald-headed old little kid is crying'.
posted by Phanx at 2:53 AM on October 27, 2008

No idea about the science behind it, but I have a very clear memory of visiting my soon-to-be elementary school when I was five years old. At a certain point a group of second-graders walked by, and I had the distinct impression that they were old. In my memory, the girls are even wearing lipstick.

The odd thing is that people several years older than me continued to look the same all the way through high school. My memory of those second-graders looks very much like how I saw, say, 12-graders when I was in 10th grade. I don't just mean how I looked up to older people was the same over all these years -- I mean my literal memory of their physical appearance stayed the same.

I'm beginning now to notice the same phenomenon in reverse. First college students started looking young to me; now graduate students look young in exactly the same way. Clearly my impressions of appearance is getting filtered through some relative-age-filter, and I, too, am curious about how that works...
posted by wyzewoman at 5:36 AM on October 27, 2008 [4 favorites]

I'm not sure it's really true. I'm geezerish (nearly 60 and have been gray-haired for a long time). A few years back I took my 20-something daughter for dinner in a trendy place near Harvard Square, where there was not one other gray-haired person. I quickly got into the music and atmosphere of the place, and it was not until near the end of our meal that I somehow realized I was about twice as old as nearly everyone in the place. But my mood had shifted to a younger "place", so I hadn't noticed that. On the other hand, if I'm acting my age, the effect you describe is pretty much automatic. So my theory is that it has to do with your frame of mind at the moment.
posted by beagle at 6:31 AM on October 27, 2008

Very simple cue: the nose and ears never stop growing as we age. Consciously or not, we can always "know" somenone's age, unless a person has been under the knife.
posted by bru at 6:35 AM on October 27, 2008

I don't have an answer for you, either. I have noticed as I've gotten older however how much easier it is for me to see youthful features in a face. I can also see connections between family members over several generations. I have never been able to see this before. Of course, confirmation bias could be going on here, but these are fun thoughts to play with nonetheless.
posted by tcv at 7:29 AM on October 27, 2008

I've noticed I have a somewhat opposite perception. Ever since I was a little kid, I've of course noticed there were older people around. They were bald, or grey- or white-haired; they moved slowly & wore old, strange, shapeless clothing; they had lumpy bodies & wrinkly faces.

Now I'm well along toward being one myself: mid-fifties. And there are still old people around. But the odd thing is, it doesn't feel to me that they are my more-or-less peers. Instead, subjectively, it feels like the older folks who have always been here are still here. It feels like the older folks I see now are the very same individuals I saw when I was little, back in the Eisenhower administration. As if all this were a play, with stock characters always played by the same actors: Nice Grey-Haired Woman Carrying A Loaf Of Bread, Grouchy Skinny Bald Man Smoking A Cigar, and so forth. Except for people I actually know, they mostly don't feel like peers at all.

It's not as noticeable, but something similar goes on with people younger than me. Stock characters: Arty College Girl In Long Hair And Leotard, Pompous Twit Wearing His First Expensive Suit, Young Guy In A T-Shirt Just Minding His Business. Same ones I knew in my twenties, still here.

There's a joke one can make on one's birthday that might apply: "I don't feel like a fifty-five year-old. I feel like an eighteen year-old who has something terribly wrong with him."
posted by Forrest Greene at 8:09 AM on October 27, 2008 [1 favorite]

You get used to it? Last week, I ran into several friends around town and each time, I was thinking "why do all of these people have grey hairs and crows feet? I don't know people old enough to have crows feet. Oh, that's right, I'm getting old!"
posted by i_love_squirrels at 8:29 AM on October 27, 2008

I don't know that everyone has this awareness. I knew of a group of men in their mid-to-late 40s (I was 20 years younger at the time) that seemed to believe that they were all still 30 years old...literally. One talked of how "maybe sometime in the future" he might finally realize his dream of joining the National Guard (this was before Gulf War II, when they ended up raising the age limits into the 40s even for non-specialists), another got quite offended when I referred to his 45-year-old friend as "middle-aged."

None of them understood why women in their early to mid twenties didn't view them as peers and dating prospects, but more as uncle or father figures.... though that could just be the triumph of wishful thinking.

I'm not so old myself yet, but college freshmen and high schoolers look increasingly young to me. Interestingly though, college-aged folks seem to be infantilizing themselves more too....in my day, there was a big push to be referred to, and refer to ourselves as, "women" and "men" (or at least "guys") instead of "girls" and "boys"....the college and grad students I work with now routinely refer to their 20-25 year old peers as "kids" non-ironically, even in professional/semi-professional situations.
posted by availablelight at 8:39 AM on October 27, 2008

People's idea of what constitutes "middle aged" is an interesting one as well. The unifying factor tends to be "around my parents' age". I've heard eleven year old kids describe people in their early thirties as "middle aged". The twenty something in the post above thought the forty five year old was "middle aged" and I still have a deep-seating belief that you're not properly middle aged until your early fifties.

It's only anecdotal, but even in the instances where somebody's parents were particularly old or young when they had children, the kids still thought their parents were middle aged.
posted by the latin mouse at 2:56 PM on October 27, 2008