Face processing
Can you recognise someone you met in a mask?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Masks hurt face memory, but the damage depended on how the study and test situations were set up, and seeing the same masked face twice did not reliably help.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Three experiments crossing mask vs no mask at study and at test: between-subjects pure lists (Exp 1), within-subjects mixed lists (Exp 2), mixed lists plus an instruction manipulation (Exp 3)
- N
- Separate samples: 169 students in Experiment 1, 34 students in Experiment 2, and 70 online participants in Experiment 3.
- Population
- Portuguese university students (Exps 1-2) and young adults recruited online via Prolific (Exp 3)
- Outcome
- Recognition hit rates, sensitivity (d') and response criterion (c) for studied vs new faces
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Key findings
In Experiment 1, masks at study reduced sensitivity, and faces studied unmasked were recognised much better unmasked than masked (d = 0.77), but a clear matching benefit for masked-masked faces did not appear. With mixed lists, whether a face was masked at study no longer mattered, while masks at test consistently made people more lenient, saying 'I recognise' more readily. Warning instructions had no reliable effect, and where study and test interacted the pattern was that masks at both phases were worst, the opposite of the predicted matching effect.
Methodology
Participants studied 32 photographed faces, each shown for 10 seconds, with or without a surgical-style mask, then after a filler task judged whether faces were people they had seen, which could appear masked or unmasked at test. Experiment 1 gave each person only masked or only unmasked faces; Experiments 2 and 3 mixed masked and unmasked faces within one list; Experiment 3 also varied whether instructions warned that masks might be added or removed. Recognition was analysed with signal detection theory.
Limitations
It does not show how well people recognise real acquaintances in masks: the same photograph was used at study and test, which confounds recognising a person with recognising a picture, as the authors acknowledge. The within-subject signal detection analysis required an unplanned random split of new faces to create separate false-alarm rates. Experiment 2 had a small sample, several key effects were marginal, and results differed between experiments, so the pattern is not fully consistent.
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