There are two things you should never ask a woman her age and her weight.
When it comes to in-depth Courier investigations however, the rules fall by the wayside.
I was sent out on to the streets of Dundee to test the veracity of Glasgow University’s claims that older people are better at judging the age of others.
It was with some apprehension that I approached strangers and asked them to take a close look at my face to guess my age.
Guesses ranged from six years younger than I am to six years older, with just one person hitting the nail on the head.
So, although my foray into the world of science wasn’t as depressing as I’d feared, my ego was left slightly bruised when I was informed by a 22-year-old that I “definitely wasn’t his age” as I’ve always considered myself to be quite youthful, at least in spirit.
Our test came after scientists from Glasgow University found that volunteers aged between 56 and 75 years were better at judging the age of others.
They used 4,000 computer-generated images to find out more about how people view the ageing process during the two-part study.
A base face was created by averaging 84 male and female faces, before being overlaid with layers of random patterns, known as Gabor noise, which darkened and brightened certain features.
Volunteers were presented with three different visages and asked to pick the “old” face.
The results showed that this was affected by a number of factors, including darkened areas between the nose and mouth which appeared as wrinkles.
The experiment was also repeated with “young” and “middle-age” choices.
Dr Nicola van Rijsbergen, one of the authors of the study, said: “Our research allows us to demonstrate the mental representations in the mind that predict age judgments.
“For example, both age groups associated old age with wrinkles from the corners of the nose to the mouth, but only older participants represented the left and right jowls in old age.
“It’s difficult to say for sure exactly why this is happening, but one theory we have is that older people spend more time thinking about age than younger people do, which leads to a more nuanced mental representation of the ageing process.”
For the second part of the study, the same templates were shown to a separate group of volunteers and again, the results showed that older people had a deeper understanding of the ageing process.
Dr Van Rijsbergen continued: “As a scientist, it’s very exciting to be able to visualise what’s going on in people’s heads with techniques such as these.
“This process gives us the tools to get a much clearer perspective on mental representations of faces and there is much more we can learn from similar studies in the future.
“Perhaps businesses who require employees to carefully evaluate other people might consider the benefits of employing older people.
“It seems that, contrary to commonly-held prejudices, older people more accurately depict socially relevant information than their younger counterparts.”
The research paper, called With Age Comes Representational Wisdom in Social Signals, is published in Current Biology.