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

Carlaw et al. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-022-00440-3 (2022) 7:90 Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications Open Access ORIGINAL ARTICLE Detecting a familiar person behind the surgical mask: recognition without identification among masked versus sunglasses‑covered faces Brooke N. Carlaw1* , Andrew M. Huebert1, Katherine L. McNeely‑White2, Matthew G. Rhodes1 and Anne M. Cleary1 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. Keywords: Familiarity-detection, Recognition without identification, Face identification, Butcher-on-the-bus, Surgical masks, Face coverings, Sunglasses, Facial features Introduction The ability to recognize people from faces may be challenging when a face is partially occluded. Recent research spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that a surgical mask over the mouth and nose of a face impairs individuals’ ability to process that face (Carragher & Hancock, 2020; Estudillo et al., 2021; Freud et al., 2020). In the present study, we investigate whether people can sense familiarity with a surgically masked face when the *Correspondence: 1 Department of Psychology, Colorado State University, 1876 Campus Delivery, Fort Collins, CO 80523‑1876, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article masked person cannot be consciously identified, in a phenomenon that might be akin to recognition without identification (RWI) of noise-masked faces (e.g., Cleary et al., 2013), or whether surgical masks prevent the type of familiarity-detection with a face that would allow for such RWI to occur. We additionally compare the effects of surgical masks vs. sunglasses on face RWI. Impairments to face processing from surgical masks Research occurring since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that surgical masks create substantial impairments in various aspects of face processing (Carragher & Hancock, 2020; Estudillo et al., 2021; Freud et al., 2020; Stajduhar et al., 2022). For example, Freud © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Carlaw et al. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications (2022) 7:90 et al. (2020) administered the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT; Duchaine & Nakayama, 2006), a standardized measure of face recognition that asks participants to first learn a set of novel faces and then later choose a studied face from among three alternatives. Overlaying faces in the CFMT with surgical masks significantly impaired performance relative to the standard version involving unmasked faces. Carragher and Hancock (2020) used a matching task that required participants to determine whether two faces presented side-by-side represented the same or different individuals. Relative to a control condition of faces presented without masks, participants’ matching accuracy was significantly poorer when one or both faces were masked. Recognition without identification (RWI) Familiarity-detection is an aspect of face processing that has yet to be investigated in the context of surgical masks. Familiarity-detection with faces is best illustrated by the now famous butcher-on-the-bus example (MacLeod, 2020; Mandler, 1980), whereby a person onboard one’s bus might seem oddly familiar while the experiencer struggles to identify why (i.e., that the familiar-seeming person is the local butcher). The method that we use to study this aspect of face processing in the present study is a variant of the RWI paradigm. RWI is the finding that, among stimuli that have been presented in such a way as to impede identification, a sense of recognition is often still present. Most forms of RWI have been shown using list-learning paradigms, whereby among unidentified stimuli (e.g., a word fragment that cannot be identified, such as R_ I_ _R _P), participants discriminate unidentified stimuli that came from a stimulus presented on an earlier study list (e.g., from the study list word RAINDROP) from stimuli that did not, such as by giving higher recognition or familiarity ratings to the former (e.g., Cleary, 2002; Cleary & Greene, 2000, 2001, 2004; 2005; Cleary et al., 2004, 2007, 2010; Kostic & Cleary, 2009; Langley et al., 2008; McNeely-White & Cleary, 2019; McNeely-White et al., 2021; Morris et al., 2008; Peynircioğlu, 1990). Most germane to the present study, RWI has also been examined in more life-like situations of familiar-novel discrimination rather than just situations of studied-unstudied discrimination, including familiarnovel discrimination among unidentified face stimuli (Cleary et al., 2013). Famous and non-famous faces were embedded within a visual noise mask created by applying a Gaussian monochromatic noise filter that made the entire face appear hazy and blurred. RWI was shown by a pattern of higher familiarity ratings for unidentified famous faces (i.e (...truncated)