Do masks and sunglasses impair age guessing and face recognition?
Wearing face masks, but not sunglasses, makes people overestimate a stranger's age, while both disguises equally harm your ability to recognize the person later when they are undisguised.
Source
Are estimates of faces' ages less accurate when they wear sunglasses or face masks and do these disguises make it harder to later recognise the faces when undisguised?
What they did
The researcher recruited 230 university students to view 30 target photographs of young adults under three conditions: undisguised, wearing sunglasses, or wearing a face mask. After viewing each face for 5 s, participants estimated the person's age. Finally, participants completed a recognition test containing the 30 target faces shown smiling and undisguised, mixed with 30 new filler faces.
What they found
Age estimates were similarly accurate for undisguised and sunglass-wearing faces, but participants overestimated ages by a median of 1.30 years more when faces wore masks. For the recognition phase, both sunglasses and face masks decreased the ability to identify the faces later, with median discrimination scores dropping from 0.88 to 0.81 for sunglasses and 0.83 for masks.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This study utilized static, passport-style photographs rather than live interactions, meaning participants could not use dynamic cues like body posture or vocal pitch that often assist in age estimation. The age estimation task was also purely perceptual because judgments occurred immediately, whereas real-world forensic assessments typically rely on memory after days or weeks. Furthermore, because both the 230 participants and the target faces were young adults, the findings might reflect an own-age bias and may not generalize to older or more diverse age groups.
Key terms
- Own-age bias
- The tendency for people to be more accurate at identifying and estimating the age of individuals who belong to their own age group.
- Signal detection theory
- A framework used to measure a perceiver's ability to distinguish actual target stimuli from distracting filler stimuli.
- Conservative response bias
- A tendency in recognition tasks where a participant is reluctant to say they recognize a stimulus, leading to fewer positive identifications overall.
- Friedman's ANOVA
- A non-parametric statistical test used to compare multiple paired groups to see if there are significant differences among them.
- Counterbalancing
- A research design technique used to control for order effects by systematically varying the order or condition of stimuli across participants.
- Filler
- A novel, distractor stimulus used in recognition tests to determine if participants can accurately identify previously seen targets.
Flashcards
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Quiz yourself
How is 'age estimation accuracy' calculated and defined in this study?
Common questions
Why did face masks affect age estimation while sunglasses did not?
Face masks cover the lower half of the face, which occludes a larger number of age-related cues like lip volume, laugh lines, and skin texture, whereas sunglasses only block the eye region.
Did the type of disguise alter how confident participants were in their recognition?
Yes, when faces had previously been seen in sunglasses or face masks, participants developed a conservative response bias, meaning they became more hesitant and reluctant to say they recognized the faces.
Was there a difference in how much sunglasses versus face masks impaired later recognition?
No, both sunglasses and face masks impaired subsequent recognition of the undisguised faces to a highly similar, statistically equivalent extent.
How does this study apply to real-world criminal investigations?
It suggests that if a criminal wears a mask or sunglasses during a crime, eyewitnesses are less likely to recognize them in a future line-up, and masks may cause witnesses to overestimate the criminal's age.
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