Gen Z’s are more likely to recognise the faces of their own age group than Boomers

GenZ’s are better at recognising people within their own age group than those outside it, according to new research.

Researchers from the University of Exeter examined the Own-Age Bias (OAB), a well-documented tendency for people to better recognise faces from their own age group. They found that older adults were equally good at recognising both older and younger faces, whereas younger adults struggled to recognise older faces.

Ciro Civile Associate Professor in Cognitive and Biological Psychology at the University of Exeter said: “Since older participants, have been young, they’ve developed the ability to process the information in younger faces and recognise them.  As they then age, they learn to process and recognise older faces. On the other hand, younger participants have only developed the ability to recognise the faces in their own age group.”

The study involved two groups: 19–30-year-olds and 69–80-year-olds. Participants were shown a series of unfamiliar faces, which were later mixed into a larger set of new faces. They were then asked to identify which faces they had seen before.

The researchers then inverted the images to see how this would affect the groups’ ability to recognise faces and saw no difference between the two groups. Because neither group has real-world experience with upside-down faces, the findings suggest that perceptual expertise – the ability to recognize and interpret sensory information, through practice – is responsible for the own-age bias.

The results help to rule out explanations that the reduced ability of the younger group to recognise older people’s faces is due to negative stereotypes or ageism (i.e., stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination based on age).

Professor Civile said: “Understanding the younger groups difficulty recognising older people is important for situations such as eyewitness testimony, where a person’s age can influence their accuracy identifying suspects outside their age group. Our findings suggest that expertise or training can improve recognition of differently age individuals.”

The paper is published in Perception entitled “Testing the Own-Age Bias in face recognition among younger and older adults via the Face Inversion Effect”