Didi Dunin¹ (), Joan Danielle K Ongchoco², Benjamin van Buren¹; ¹The New School, ²University of British Columbia

When we meet someone, we quickly make judgments about them based on how old they look (e.g. about their physical abilities, cognitive abilities and personality traits). But how is a person’s age represented in the mind in the first place? In our previous work, we found that a briefly viewed, 60-year-old face is remembered as older than it really was: a 60-year-old face is more likely to be remembered as matching the age of a decoy which is ten years older, than it is to be remembered as matching the age of a decoy which is ten years younger. Does this effect reflect assimilation toward the extreme end of the age spectrum (around 90+ years old) or rather toward an ‘old’ prototype (perhaps around 75 years old)? To investigate this, here we tested whether memory for the age of an 80-year-old face is assimilated upward or downward. Participants saw a target 80-year-old face and subsequently saw two new decoy faces – one 70-years-old, and one 90-years-old — and selected the face that they thought matched the age of the target. We found a robust bias for participants to select the younger, 70-year-old decoy, suggesting that memory is assimilated towards a septuagenarian ‘old’ prototype.