Face processing
How do face masks affect remembering faces, and can gaze help?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Masks made unfamiliar faces harder to remember in every combination tested, most of all when a face was seen masked at one time and unmasked at the other, and people who adapted where they looked were less affected.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — 2 x 2 within-subject old/new face recognition task (masked vs unmasked at learning x at recognition) with eye tracking analysed by hidden Markov models, plus intelligence and executive-function tests
- N
- N=88 · 88 university students or graduates; each completed eight learning-recognition blocks
- Population
- University students and graduates aged 17-30 (51 women), viewing unfamiliar Asian faces
- Outcome
- Recognition sensitivity (d') and response time; eye movement pattern (eyes-focused vs broader) and gaze consistency (entropy)
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Key findings
Compared with unmasked faces at both stages, recognition accuracy dropped substantially when masks were worn at learning only, at test only and at both stages, with a strong interaction showing the worst performance when mask status did not match between learning and test. When recognising masked faces, people looked more at the eyes and made more consistent gaze transitions, whereas gaze during learning did not change with masks. People who shifted more toward an eyes-focused pattern when recognising unmasked faces learned with masks lost less accuracy (a modest correlation), and this held after controlling for intelligence and executive abilities.
Methodology
Eighty-eight students memorised sets of unfamiliar faces and later judged which faces they had seen, while an eye tracker recorded their gaze. Each face appeared masked or unmasked at learning and masked or unmasked at test, giving four conditions, with mask colour and lighting changed between phases so pictures were never identical. Gaze sequences were modelled with hidden Markov models to classify each person's looking pattern and its consistency, and participants also completed tests of intelligence, working memory, planning and attention.
Limitations
The links between gaze change and accuracy are modest correlations, so they do not show that changing gaze strategy causes better recognition; a training study would be needed to test the authors' suggestion of teaching eye strategies. Participants were young, educated adults viewing unfamiliar Asian face photos with digitally added masks, so the results may not apply to familiar faces, real-life encounters, or the children, older adults and autistic people the authors speculate are vulnerable. The eyes-focused advantage was specific to one mismatch condition, and the gaze-consistency correlation became only marginal once cognitive abilities were controlled.
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