Face processing
Do masks and sunglasses impair age guessing and face recognition?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
How this study connects
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Visual disguises and physical stimulus degradation degrade objective discrimination performance, reducing the observer's ability to accurately classify signals.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Age estimates and identity discrimination for faces with sunglasses, masks, or uncovered
- N
- N=230
- Population
- Adults judging ages and identities of photographed faces
- Outcome
- Age-estimation accuracy and identity discrimination when faces wear sunglasses or masks vs uncovered
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Do masks and sunglasses impair age guessing and face recognition?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
230 participants in the final sample
Our final sample had 230 participants.
30 unfamiliar faces used as targets during the age estimation task
During the age estimation task, participants saw passport-style colour photographs of 30 unfamiliar White adult faces from the Center for Vital Longevity Face Database (Minear & Park, ).
Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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