Can we sense familiarity in faces covered by masks or sunglasses?
People can still sense if a face is familiar even when surgical masks or sunglasses make it impossible to identify who the person is.
Source
Detecting a familiar person behind the surgical mask: recognition without identification among masked versus sunglasses-covered faces
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Online recognition-without-identification of familiar faces wearing surgical masks
- N
- N=54 · Prolific adults, August 2021; sample sized for a medium RWI effect
- Population
- Online adults judging masked familiar faces
- Outcome
- Recognition of a familiar person when the face is covered by a surgical mask
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Can we sense familiarity in faces covered by masks or sunglasses?
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54 online participants
Fifty-four participants were recruited from the online research platform Prolific in August 2021.
112 college students
Based on Experiment 1’s sample size estimate and a stop date, 112 students from Colorado State University participated in-person in exchange for credit toward a course.
What they did
In the initial study, researchers showed 54 online participants images of famous and non-famous faces obscured by a hood and a surgical mask. Participants rated how familiar each face felt and then tried to identify the person, followed by a subsequent phase where they identified the unmasked faces. A follow-up study with 112 college students compared these surgical masks to sunglasses.
What they found
Surgical masks dramatically reduced face identification, as participants only identified 38% of known celebrities when they were masked in the initial study. In the follow-up study, participants identified only 28% of known faces when wearing surgical masks, and only 16% when wearing sunglasses. Despite these identification failures, participants still rated masked famous faces as more familiar than masked non-famous faces.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study relied on older celebrity images, which many participants struggled to recognize even when completely unmasked. Additionally, because the study did not gather demographic data, it cannot determine if factors like race, age, or gender affect this familiarity detection. Finally, the research used artificial, digital face overlays and a black hood, which may not fully replicate how we encounter masked or sunglass-wearing people in the real world.
Key terms
- Recognition without identification (RWI)
- A phenomenon where a person feels a sense of familiarity or recognition for a stimulus without being able to consciously identify what it is.
- Holistic processing
- The cognitive mechanism of perceiving and processing a face as a single integrated whole rather than as a collection of individual features.
- Global feature matching
- A memory retrieval process where cues in the environment are compared to features stored in memory to compute a general signal of familiarity.
- Commission error
- An error that occurs when a participant actively provides incorrect information instead of simply leaving an answer blank.
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What is the primary phenomenon investigated in this study regarding partially occluded faces?
Common questions
Why did sunglasses impair face recognition more than surgical masks?
The eyes and eyebrows are highly critical features for holistic face processing and individual identification, meaning that covering them with sunglasses removes more crucial visual information than covering the nose and mouth with a mask.
How did the researchers know if a participant actually knew the famous person?
They included a subsequent phase where participants viewed all the famous faces completely unmasked and unhooded, allowing the researchers to only analyze trials of celebrities the participant actually knew.
Does this study suggest that we should avoid wearing sunglasses if we want to be recognized?
Yes, the findings suggest that sunglasses combined with a head covering are extremely disruptive, leaving participants able to identify only 16% of otherwise recognizable faces.
What is the practical value of feeling familiarity if you still can't identify the person?
The researchers suggest that a sense of familiarity might act as a mental trigger, prompting your brain to actively search your memory and try to retrieve more specific details about who the person is.
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