Salma Ben Messaoud¹ (), Gray Koudinova¹, Cordula Hunt², Bozana Meinhardt-Injac³, Boutet Isabelle¹; ¹University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, ²Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Rhineland Palatinate, Germany, ³Catholic University of Applied Social Sciences, Berlin, Germin

Introduction: Facial recognition is crucial to the unfolding of our social lives. In younger adults (YAs), two decades of research provide support for a ‘social encoding benefit’, wherein individuals are better at recognizing new faces learnt using social encoding strategies as opposed to perceptual ones (e.g., Mueller et al., 1978; Winograd, 1981; Schwartz & Yovel, 2018). Healthy ageing is associated with a generalized decline in facial recognition abilities (e.g., Boutet et al., 2015). To our knowledge, only one study has sought out to investigate how different encoding strategies could mitigate this decline (Winograd, 1978). However, this investigation presents various methodological limitations, including usage of the same images during encoding and testing. The present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of social and perceptual encoding strategies in older adults, whilst varying the presentation format of faces in between encoding and testing to account for such real-life variations (Burton, 2015). Methods: Younger (YAs; n=34, aged 18-35) and older adults (OAs; n=16, aged 65+) have been tested so far. In the encoding phase, participants were presented with faces of different individuals and asked to remember them. Faces were shown under three encoding conditions: social, perceptual and control. In the testing phase, participants were shown pictures of the same individuals under a different illumination or viewpoint, as well as faces of new distractor individuals. Participants indicated if they recognized the shown individual. Results: Preliminary results suggest that irrespective of participant age, performance was better in the social encoding condition than control and perceptual conditions. Additionally, OAs displayed a tendency for lower facial recognition accuracy overall. Conclusion: This study suggests that OA could benefit from using a social encoding strategy to facilitate recognition of new people they meet. We are currently testing additional OA participants and exploring the effectiveness of other encoding strategies.