Face masks affect emotion categorisation, age estimation, recognition, and gender classification from faces

Abstract

Although putting on a mask over our nose and mouth is a simple but powerful way to protect ourselves and others during a pandemic, face masks may interfere with how we perceive and recognize one another, and hence, may have far-reaching impacts on communication and social interactions. To date, it remains relatively unknown the extent to which wearing a face mask that conceals the bottom part of the face affects the extraction of different facial information. To address this question, we compared young adults’ performance between masked and unmasked faces in four different tasks: (1) emotion recognition task, (2) famous face recognition and naming test, (3) age estimation task, and (4) gender classification task. Results revealed that the presence of face mask has a negative impact on famous face recognition and emotion recognition, but to a smaller extent on age estimation and gender classification tasks. More interestingly, we observed a female advantage in the famous face recognition and emotion recognition tasks and a female own-gender bias in gender categorisation and age estimation tasks. Overall, these findings allude to the lack of malleability of the adulthood face recognition and perceptual systems.

Effect of mask coverage on face identification in Taiwanese men and women

“…Identification accuracy and time differed between men and women. A study on female facial expression identification demonstrated that women have faster and more accurate reaction times than men ( Lewin and Herlitz, 2002 ), and also confirmed by other studies ( Megreya et al, 2011 ; Godard et al, 2013 ; Hansen et al, 2021 ; Wong and Estudillo, 2022 ). Lewin and Herlitz (2002) indicated that women’s higher face recognition performance was hypothesized to be related to either their higher verbal ability or to their superiority in recognizing female faces.…”

“…During a typical test, a serial list of unfamiliar faces was displayed for few seconds each, and participants were requested to memorize these faces, as they had to identify them from unfamiliar faces later. In such studies, women superiority in face identification was consistently represented by their higher accuracy compared to men ( Megreya et al, 2011 ; Godard et al, 2013 ; Hansen et al, 2021 ; Wong and Estudillo, 2022 ). Furthermore, Sun et al (2017) used a modified delayed matching-to-sample task to investigate the time course characteristics of face identification by event-related potential (ERP) for both sexes.…”

Face coverings: Considering the implications for face perception and speech communication

“…Using a similar static-based face emotion recognition task, Rinke et al ( 2022 ) showed that the impairment was largest for disgust, followed by fear, surprise, sadness, and happiness. It was not significant for anger (also see Wong & Estudillo, 2022 ) or neutral expressions. Here, they concluded that participants were likely to confuse emotions that share activation of the visible muscles in the upper half of the face.…”

“…To this aim, in this thematic series, the detrimental effects of masks were investigated in children (Stajduhar & Freud, 2022 ) and in adults with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (Tso et al, 2022 ). Despite the detrimental effect of masks on famous face identification (Wong & Estudillo, 2022 ) familiarity-detection could still occur (Carlow et al, 2022 ). Research showed that it was harder to remember not only the identity of unfamiliar faces but whether or not that unfamiliar face wore a mask (Kollenda & de Haas, 2022 ) .…”

“…This is consistent with the paper by Thorley et al ( 2022 ) who found that eyewitnesses may struggle when perpetrators wear face masks during offences (but not at identification). They also found inaccurate age estimates of people who wear face masks (also see Ganel & Goodale, 2022 ; Wong & Estudillo, 2022 ). The paper by Carragher et al, ( 2022 ) suggests that some of the deficit in masked face matching may be alleviated by feature-based training.…”