Detecting a familiar person behind the surgical mask: recognition without identification among masked versus sunglasses-covered faces

Abstract

Previous research has shown that even when famous people’s identities cannot be discerned from faces that have been filtered with monochromatic noise, these unidentifiable famous faces still tend to receive higher familiarity ratings than similarly filtered non-famous faces. Experiment 1 investigated whether a similar face recognition without identification effect would occur among faces whose identification was hindered through the wearing of a surgical mask. Among a mixture of famous and non-famous faces wearing surgical masks and hoods, participants rated how familiar each person seemed then attempted to identify the person. Though surgical masks significantly impaired identification of the famous faces, unidentified masked famous faces received higher familiarity ratings on average than the non-famous masked faces, suggesting that a sense of familiarity could still occur even when identification was impaired by the mask. Experiment 2 compared faces covered by surgical masks with faces covered by sunglasses. Though sunglasses impaired face identification more than surgical masks, the magnitude of the face recognition without identification effect was the same in both cases. This pattern suggests that holistic face processing is not a requirement for the sense of familiarity with a face, and that different facial feature types can contribute.

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.…”

“…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.…”

“…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. Another study [20] similarly found effect of familiarity using a recognition without identification (RWI) paradigm but failed to find any difference in RWI effect between face occlusion due to sunglass and surgical masks.…”

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

“…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 ) .…”

What Flips Attention?

“…This is perhaps a good candidate mechanism for transitioning attentional focus from being outward-directed to more inward-directed, and possibly for sending the hippocampus from a primarily encoding-focused mode to a retrieval-focused mode. Recent findings support this idea; two recent studies showed that people generate incorrect candidate bits of information (a possible indicator of retrieval search effort) more often when detecting familiarity with something (Carlaw, Huebert, McNeely-White, Rhodes, & Cleary, 2022;McNeely-White, 2022). Another recent study showed that systematically increasing a cue's perceived familiarity level during retrieval failure led to a corresponding increase in false recollective experience (another possible indicator of retrieval search effort; .…”