Face processing
Do face masks make it harder for children to recognise faces?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Masks cut children's ability to recognise newly learned faces by about a fifth and made them process faces less as a whole, an effect somewhat larger than in adults on a difficulty-matched test.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Online experiment: mask vs no mask between subjects, upright vs inverted faces within subjects, on the CFMT-K; children compared with adults on the difficulty-matched adult CFMT and on the same CFMT-K
- N
- N=72 · 72 children aged 6-14 (37 masked, 35 unmasked); comparison groups of 495 adults on the adult CFMT and 72 adults on the CFMT-K
- Population
- School-age children in Canada recruited by snowball sampling, plus adult online participants recruited via Prolific
- Outcome
- Percentage correct on the Cambridge Face Memory Test (Kids and adult versions) for upright and inverted faces; face inversion effect as an index of holistic processing
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Key findings
Masks lowered children's accuracy for upright faces by about 20%. Turning faces upside down hurt performance by 23% for unmasked faces but only 15% for masked faces, suggesting masked faces are processed less holistically; masked inverted faces were still well above chance, so this was not a floor effect. The mask cost was about the same for younger and older children, even though older children performed better overall and showed a bigger inversion effect. Compared with adults on the difficulty-matched test, children's mask cost was larger (20.1% vs 13.6%), but when adults took the children's test they were so accurate that no difference in mask cost could be detected; girls outperformed boys.
Methodology
Children completed the Cambridge Face Memory Test for Kids at home online, learning children's faces and then picking them out from new viewpoints, lighting and added noise. They were randomly assigned to see all faces with a mask or without, and each child did the test once with upright and once with upside-down faces, since a large drop for inverted faces signals holistic (whole-face) processing. Their results were compared with 495 adults who took the difficulty-matched adult version, and with 72 adults who took the same children's version.
Limitations
Children did the test unsupervised at home, and parents were encouraged to help younger children read instructions, so testing conditions varied. The child-adult difference in mask cost was small and appeared only on the difficulty-matched comparison, not when adults took the same child test, where a ceiling effect clouds interpretation. The CFMT-K uses only male Caucasian faces, which limits claims about sex differences and other-race faces. Masks were added digitally to static photos, so the study says nothing directly about recognising real masked teachers and classmates or about social consequences.
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