Who's Behind That Face Mask?

The study published on December 21, 2020, provides novel evidence for quantitative and qualitative changes in how humans process other people when wearing face masks. These changes in performance, together with the alteration and the processing style of partially occluded faces, could have significant effects on daily living activities, including social interactions, as well as other situations involving personal interactions such as education, stated these researchers.

These researchers from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev found that the success rate of identifying someone wearing a mask was reduced by 15%.

"Faces are among the most informative and significant visual stimuli in human perception and play a unique role in communicative, social daily interactions," the researchers noted in a press statement. "The magnitude of the effect of masks that we report in the current study is probably an underestimation of the actual degree in performance dropdown for masked faces."