The impact of the use of masks on trait judgments and face recognition

Memory & Cognition https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-023-01495-3 The impact of the use of masks on trait judgments and face recognition Raquel Pinto1 · Pedro B. Albuquerque1 Accepted: 10 November 2023 © The Author(s) 2023 Abstract Although effective in reducing virus transmission, face masks might compromise face recognition and trait judgments. With this study, we aimed to observe the influence of masks on face recognition and trait judgments—more specifically, in trustworthiness, dominance, and distinctiveness judgments. Also, we wanted to observe the possible influence of trait judgments on facial recognition for masked and unmasked faces, which has never been done before. For that, we conducted an online study where 140 participants observed and made trait judgments of masked and unmasked faces in a within-subjects design. After a distractive task, participants performed a recognition memory test. As expected, we observed a better recognition of faces shown without a mask during the study phase, which allowed the holistic processing of the faces. The worst performance was found for faces encoded with a mask but tested without it, occurring simultaneity disruption in holistic face processing and the violation of the encoding specificity principle. Regarding the trait judgments, unmasked faces were considered more distinctive, and masked faces were considered more trustworthy. More interestingly, we can conclude that facial distinctiveness predicts face recognition, regardless of mask use. In contrast, dominance judgments only predicted face recognition when faces were presented without a mask. When faces were exposed with masks, trustworthiness overrides dominance, becoming more critical to recognizing faces. We can interpret these results from an evolutionary perspective. Keywords Face recognition · Trait judgments · Face masks · Memory Introduction One of the public health guidelines that the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended as a response to prevent the spread of COVID-19 was the use of face masks (WHO, 2020). Although the world is returning to normality, with face masks no longer mandatory in some countries, as in the case of Portugal (Decree-Law 30-E/2022, 2022), many people continue to use them to prevent infections, particularly in public places as public transport and health institutions. The use of face masks, despite being effective in reducing virus transmission (Howard et al., 2021), impairs face recognition because the face masks cover about 60% to 70% of the face area that is relevant for the identification of a person * Raquel Pinto Pedro B. Albuquerque 1 School of Psychology, University of Minho (Portugal), Campus de Gualtar, 4710‑057 Braga, Portugal (e.g., Tsao & Livingstone, 2008)—namely, the nose, mouth, and chin. The impact of the use of masks in face recognition is not surprising because faces seem to be processed holistically (Farah et al., 1998; Logan et al., 2017; Meltzer & Bartlett, 2019; Taubert et al., 2011), which means that faces are perceived as a whole rather than a single combination of each component (e.g., eyes, nose, mouth). So, when a face is occluded or covered by a mask, sunglasses, hat, beard, scarf, or a religious veil, it is impossible to perform the holistic processing of the face (e.g., Davies & Flin, 1984; Hockley et al., 1999; Mansour et al., 2017; Nguyen & Pezdek, 2017; Righi et al., 2012), which appears to deteriorate its recognition (e.g., McKelvie, 1976). Freud et al. (2020) corroborated these results and showed that masks appeared to impair face recognition by disrupting holistic processing. The authors instructed participants to complete the Cambridge Face Memory Test (Duchaine & Nakayama, 2006) and observed that face masks impaired identity recognition. This result occurred regardless of the mask being present when a face is encountered at encoding or during a recognition test. In particular, the authors (Freud 13 Vol.:(0123456789) Memory & Cognition et al., 2020) found that holistic processing was disrupted for faces with masks, as suggested by a reduced inversion effect. So, when faces are presented upside-down, they take longer to process, suggesting that disrupting the usual way we perceive faces (i.e., upright) affects their holistic processing (e.g., Taubert et al., 2011). Nevertheless, when masked faces are presented upside-down, they do not take long to process since holistic processing was already disrupted. The impact of the use of the mask on face recognition is particularly important in eyewitness testimony, namely on lineup person identification (e.g., Manley et al., 2019, Exp. 2). The authors found that the recognition performance was better when participants observed an unmasked face at the study phase (i.e., encoding phase) and with a full-face lineup (unmasked face at the test phase). However, their worse performance occurred when participants observed a face with a ski mask during the study phase and a full-face lineup. So, results showed that matching the conditions (i.e., the use of a ski mask) in the study and test phase results in a better eyewitness identification performance. The authors (Manley et al., 2019) explained these results based on the transferappropriate processing framework, which proposes that the performance on a memory test is higher when the processes activated at retrieval match those at encoding—encoding specificity principle (e.g., Morris et al., 1977). Therefore, this principle suggests that the impact of a mask on facial recognition likely also depends on the relationship between study and test conditions (i.e., if the conditions between the study and test phase match or not). The impact of the disruption in holistic face processing and the violation of the encoding specificity principle on face recognition was also shown in a study implemented by Guerra et al. (2022). In this study, better face recognition occurred when faces were presented without a mask during the study and the test phase (i.e., at the congruent unmasked condition). As in Manley et al.’ (2019) study, worse recognition performance was observed when faces were presented with a mask during the study phase but tested without it (i.e., masked–unmasked incongruent condition). The authors explained this worse performance by the disruption in holistic face processing and the violation of the encoding specificity principle (Guerra et al., 2022). In the condition where faces were presented without a mask in the study phase but with a mask in the test phase, it also occurred the violation of the encoding specificity principle (i.e., the conditions between the study and test phases did not match). Still, the performance did not suffer a decay to the same extent. The holistic processing that occurred during the study phase, where the faces were presented without masks, likely protected the face recognition performance (Guerra et al., 2022). Besides face recognition, it was observed that face (...truncated)