Surgical face masks impair human face matching performance for familiar and unfamiliar faces.

ABSTRACT: In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments around the world now recommend, or require, that their citizens cover the lower half of their face in public. Consequently, many people now wear surgical face masks in public. We investigated whether surgical face masks affected the performance of human observers, and a state-of-the-art face recognition system, on tasks of perceptual face matching. Participants judged whether two simultaneously presented face photographs showed the same person or two different people. We superimposed images of surgical masks over the faces, creating three different mask conditions: control (no masks), mixed (one face wearing a mask), and masked (both faces wearing masks). We found that surgical face masks have a large detrimental effect on human face m

SUBMITTER: Carragher DJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7673975 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature