The influence of familiarity on memory for faces and mask wearing

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the wearing of face masks became mandatory in public areas or at workplaces in many countries. While offering protection, the coverage of large parts of our face (nose, mouth and chin) may have consequences for face recognition. This seems especially important in the context of contact tracing which can require memory of familiar and unfamiliar contacts and whether they were wearing a mask. In this study, we tested how well participants perform at remembering faces and whether they wore a mask, and if this depends on familiarity. Our results show that: (a) Participants remembered familiar faces better than unfamiliar ones, regardless of mask wearing. (b) Participants remembered unmasked faces better than masked faces, regardless of familiarity. (c) Participants were significantly worse at remembering whether an unfamiliar face was wearing a mask or not—even if they indicated remembering the face. (d) Participants showed a bias to indicate no memory of unfamiliar faces. (e) Participants showed a bias to indicate that unfamiliar faces wore a mask, even if they did not. In sum, it was harder to remember both, the identity of unfamiliar faces and whether they wore a mask. These findings have practical relevance for contact tracing and epidemic control.

Does visual experience with face masks aid face recognition during the COVID-19 pandemic?

“…Our results show that the impact of face masks was most prominent during famous face recognition and convincingly shows the effect of familiarity in both masked and unmasked condition while previous study [11] shows the opposite trend. However recent studies [19,20] shows effect on familiarity on masked face recognition which is in line with our results. A previous study [12] also found deterioration in performance for unfamiliar face compared to familiar face matching in cross-experimental comparisons.…”

“…Furthermore, participants tended to commit more false positive errors in the face matching task when familiar faces were masked, and more false negative errors when unfamiliar faces were masked. Contrary results were observed in a more recent study [19] on the effect of face masks on familiarity. The authors demonstrate using a face memory task that face familiarity indeed plays a role in face recognition and people tend to remember familiar faces more than unfamiliar faces irrespective of face-masks.…”

“…Face masks used generously during the pandemic have significantly affected our ability to process and recognize face. Previous behavioral studies in the past 2 years have shown that face masks had a detrimental effect on face processing and recognition [11,39,12,14,13,18,19]. Effect of face mask has also been evident during emotion recognition [13,14,24].…”

“…However in studies showing familiarity effect using face mask including the current study, the task was more challenging. We use a 2-back test while [20] uses a recognition without identification paradigm and in [19], short-term memory for famous and unfamiliar identities in masked conditions were used. Participants identify the two faces within the same trial in matching tasks whereas in face memory tasks including ours, the participants use stored representation of faces shown previously to compare with the test image.…”

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

“…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 ) .…”