Abstract Considerable debates about the general community use of face masks for protection against COVID-19 stemmed out from differing views taken by health authorities. Misconceptions and stigmatization towards the use of face masks may hinder the containment of the COVID-19 pandemic. We address this previous debate by analyzing the advice on the community use of masks across different credible health authorities: countries that promoted the use of masks acknowledged that masks are effective, but also explained the importance of their proper use along with other hygiene measures. In contrast, authorities that recommended against the community use of masks mainly cited shortage of supplies, the argument that the public do not have the adequate skills to wear them, or that wearing masks might reduce compliance with other important behaviors. We suggest promoting effective behavioral changes in personal protective measures by teaching microbiological knowledge instead of just listing out the “dos-and-don’ts”.

Recent research on visual object recognition has suggested that the right hemisphere can engage either holistic or part-based processing depending on whether the recognition relies on configural (exact distances among features) or featural information, respectively. Consistent with this finding, expert Chinese reading has been marked by a left-side bias (an indication of righthemisphere lateralization) with decreased holistic processing (as assessed using the composite paradigm) due to its reliance on featural information. Here we examine two common perceptual expertise phenomena in object recognitionholistic processing and left-side biasof Chinese characters in adolescents with developmental dyslexia and matched controls. We found that those with dyslexia showed stronger holistic processing, a weaker left-side bias, and worse performance in Chinese character dictation than controls. This was in contrast to Limited writers (proficient readers with limited writing experience) reported in Tso, Au, and Hsiao (Psychological Science, 25, 1757-1767, who showed stronger holistic processing and worse dictation performance, but the same level of left-side bias as controls. This result demonstrated two different perceptual mechanisms underlying holistic processing: Limited writers' holistic processing may be due to difficulties in de-emphasizing configural information unimportant to Chinese characters, whereas readers with dyslexia may have deficits selectively attending to character components to form appropriate part-based representations in the right hemisphere.

We examined how mask use affects performance and eye movements in face recognition and whether strategy change reflected in eye movements is associated with performance change. Eighty-eight participants performed face recognition with masked faces either during learning only, during recognition only, or during both learning and recognition. As compared with the baseline condition where faces were unmasked during both learning and recognition, participants had impaired performance in all three scenarios, with larger impairment when mask conditions during learning and recognition did not match. When recognizing unmasked faces, whether the faces were learned with or without a mask on did not change eye movement behavior. Nevertheless, when recognizing unmasked faces that were learned with a mask on, participants who adopted more eyes-focused patterns had less performance impairment as compared with the baseline condition. When recognizing masked faces, participants had more eyes-focused patterns and more consistent gaze transition behavior than recognizing unmasked faces regardless of whether the faces were learned with or without a mask on. Nevertheless, when recognizing masked faces that were learned without a mask, participants whose gaze transition behavior was more consistent had less performance impairment as compared with the baseline condition. Thus, although eye movements during recognition were mainly driven by the mask condition during recognition but not that during learning, those who adjusted their strategy according to the mask condition difference between learning and recognition had better performance. This finding has important implications for identifying populations vulnerable to the impact of mask use and potential remedial strategies.

Holistic processing and left-side bias are both behavioral markers of expert face recognition. By contrast, expert recognition of characters in Chinese orthography involves left-side bias but reduced holistic processing, although faces and Chinese characters share many visual properties. Here, we examined whether this reduction in holistic processing of Chinese characters can be better explained by writing experience than by reading experience. Compared with Chinese nonreaders, Chinese readers who had limited writing experience showed increased holistic processing, whereas Chinese readers who could write characters fluently showed reduced holistic processing. This result suggests that writing and sensorimotor experience can modulate holistic-processing effects and that the reduced holistic processing observed in expert Chinese readers may depend mostly on writing experience. However, both expert writers and writers with limited experience showed similarly stronger left-side bias than novices did in processing mirror-symmetric Chinese characters; left-side bias may therefore be a robust expertise marker for object recognition that is uninfluenced by sensorimotor experience.