There are many questions surrounding face masks and the impact masks will have on facial identification. Can we recognize the faces of people we know well if they are wearing a mask? How do masks affect our ability to recognize a person's emotions?
A new study shows for the first time that performance can be improved by using super recognizers, people who are very skilled at recognizing faces. It also reveals that masks make it difficult to recognize someone's emotions.
Three scenarios
The study consisted of three experiments which tested recognition of familiar faces, recognition of an unfamiliar face (image matching, also known as face matching), and emotion recognition. The researchers compared facial recognition and emotion recognition for unmasked faces, faces with masks, and faces with sunglasses, something much more common than masks.
In the first experiment, participants were presented with pairs of famous faces and asked to decide whether the images were of the same person or two different people.
People tend to identify the faces of people they know well very well, but masks reduced accuracy in this task. There was no difference in accuracy for faces with masks compared to faces with sunglasses. Accuracy on the familiar face recognition task remained high, around 90%.
Also involved in the task were a group of people known to be 'super recognizers'. The super recognizers They have an exceptional natural ability to recognize a face. The super recognizers outperformed typical observers of unmasked faces, faces with masks, and faces with sunglasses, showing that they still outperformed typical observers even when looking at hidden faces.
What about recognizing a person's emotional expressions? Participants in the study viewed images of faces and were asked to decide which emotion had been shown.
The emotions 'happiness', 'disgust' and 'surprise' were particularly difficult to recognize when faces were masked, but recognition of the emotions 'anger' and 'fear' was affected by both masks and sunglasses. .
The results of the study, then, show that the lower half of the face is important for facial identification and emotion recognition. It's not all in the eyes.
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The news
Recognizing emotions in someone who wears a mask is not so easy: not everything is in the eyes
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.