Surgical face masks impair human face matching performance for familiar and unfamiliar faces

Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications
Daniel J Carragher, Peter J B Hancock

Abstract

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments around the world now recommend, or require, that their citizens cover the lower half of their face in public. Consequently, many people now wear surgical face masks in public. We investigated whether surgical face masks affected the performance of human observers, and a state-of-the-art face recognition system, on tasks of perceptual face matching. Participants judged whether two simultaneously presented face photographs showed the same person or two different people. We superimposed images of surgical masks over the faces, creating three different mask conditions: control (no masks), mixed (one face wearing a mask), and masked (both faces wearing masks). We found that surgical face masks have a large detrimental effect on human face matching performance, and that the degree of impairment is the same regardless of whether one or both faces in each pair are masked. Surprisingly, this impairment is similar in size for both familiar and unfamiliar faces. When matching masked faces, human observers are biased to reject unfamiliar faces as "mismatches" and to accept familiar faces as "matches". Finally, the face recognition system showed very high classification accuracy for con...Continue Reading

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Citations

Mar 2, 2021·Neurobiology of Disease·Chiara FerrariSilvia Natoli
Jun 3, 2021·International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health·Maamer SlimaniNicola Luigi Bragazzi
Jun 18, 2021·Neuron·Istvan Molnar-SzakacsMary Beth Heffernan
Sep 15, 2021·Cerebral Cortex·Marina A Pavlova, Arseny A Sokolov
Sep 23, 2021·Perception·Julian A Oldmeadow, Christoph Koch
Oct 13, 2021·PloS One·Elyssa M BarrickDiana I Tamir

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Software Mentioned

Qualtrics
GNU Image Manipulation Program
GIMP
JASP
Prolific
FACER2VM

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