Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new challenges for governments and individuals. Unprecedented efforts at reducing virus transmission launched a novel arena for human face recognition in which faces are partially occluded with masks. Previous studies have shown that masks decrease accuracy of face identity and emotion recognition. The current study focuses on the impact of masks on the speed of processing of these and other important social dimensions. Here we provide a systematic assessment of the impact of COVID-19 masks on facial identity, emotion, gender, and age. Four experiments (N = 116) were conducted in which participants categorized faces on a predefined dimension (e.g., emotion). Both speed and accuracy were measured. The results revealed that masks hindered the perception of virtually all tested facial dimensions (i.e., emotion, gender, age, and identity), interfering with normal speed and accuracy of categorization. We also found that the unwarranted effects of masks were not due to holistic processes, because the Face Inversion Effect (FIE) was generally not larger with unmasked compared with masked faces. Moreover, we found that the impact of masks is not automatic and that under some contexts observers can control at least part of their detrimental effects.
Highlights
Faces are among the most important stimuli in our environment
Wearing face masks has become an important measure in reducing the rates of transmitting respiratory diseases (Van der Sande et al, 2008)
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic mask, it has become a regular practice in many countries over the world
Summary
Faces are among the most important stimuli in our environment. They convey information regarding many primary attributes such as: identity, emotion, gender, and age (Bruce and Young, 1986). Previous studies (Carragher and Hancock, 2020; Freud et al, 2020) have largely focused on the question of how masks affect recognition accuracy of facial identity or facial emotion (Carbon, 2020; Grundmann et al, 2021) While most of these efforts pointed to the dramatic effects of masks on these aspects, many practical and theoretical issues have remained unanswered: (a) the degree to which masks affect speed of processing of faces, (b) the influence of masks on other primary facial dimensions such as age, and gender which play a central role in social cognition (Darwin, 1872; Freeman et al, 2012; Cloutier et al, 2014), (c) the mechanisms that may be responsible for these effects, and (d) the role of strategies in producing these effects. All of these bear tremendous import for more advanced processes that depend on correct and efficient initial person construal processes (Freeman and Ambady, 2011; Fitousi, 2020b), such as impression formation and stereotyping (Oosterhof and Todorov, 2008)
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