Abstract
Previous work showed that despite good visual acuity, many healthy older people require more contrast to see gratings of low and intermediate spatial frequencies than do younger observers. Here we report that a daily perceptual activity, which relies on lower spatial frequency information, is also adversely affected: as compared to young individuals, many older individuals require more contrast to detect a face and to discriminate between two faces. Ocular pathology, optical changes within the eyeball, and variation in criterion are ruled out as explanations for the age-related elevation in threshold.