ArticleCognitive research: principles and implications2020
Surgical face masks impair human face matching performance for familiar and unfamiliar faces.
Article in Cognitive research: principles and implications, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 85 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
85 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Face Processing in Early Development: A Systematic Review of Behavioral Studies and Considerations in Times of COVID-19 Pandemic.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Pooled it
- The impact of briefly observing faces in opaque facial masks on emotion recognition and empathic concern.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2023Trial
- Article
- Time Pressure Increases Automation Reliance in a Face Matching Task.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2026Article
- Identity in the spotlight: Matching faces without overlapping features.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Face masks do not hinder gaze-triggered social attention.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Two Out of Three Ain't Bad: Aggregating Multiple Identification Decisions from the Same Observer Improves Unfamiliar Face Matching Performance.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2026Article
- Automated face recognition assists with low-prevalence face identity mismatches but can bias users.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Masked and elusive: congruency fails in video-to-photo face matching.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2026Article
- Do You Fail to Recognize Me with a Mask on? The Impact of Voice on Mask-Occluded Facial Identity Recognition.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Understanding the influence of design-related factors on human-AI teaming in a face matching task.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2026Article
- Visual exposure to masked faces benefits personally familiar but not famous face recognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- No evidence for disruption of empathy and mentalizing by face coverage in multimodal settings.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Partial face visibility and facial cognition: event-related potential and eye tracking investigation.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2025Article
- Unveiling the "Less is More" paradox: How experience and cognitive filling drive attractiveness in occluded faces.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Article
- Congruency effects and individual differences in masked face recognition under limited feature visibility.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Mask dynamics in eye region-based person identification: Effects of mask removal and addition.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Ensemble perception of faces with naturalistic occlusions.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Association Between Sociodemographic Disparities and Door to Computerized Tomography Time in Patients with Acute Ischemic Stroke Across COVID-19 Periods in the Emergency Department: A Multi-Center Cohort Study.Medical sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Masked face matching benefits from isolated facial features.PloS one · 2025Article
25 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
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 matching performance, and that the degree of impairment is the same regardless of whether one or both faces in each pair are masked. Surprisingly, this impairment is similar in size for both familiar and unfamiliar faces. When matching masked faces, human observers are biased to reject unfamiliar faces as "mismatches" and to accept familiar faces as "matches". Finally, the face recognition system showed very high classification accuracy for control and masked stimuli, even though it had not been trained to recognise masked faces. However, accuracy fell markedly when one face was masked and the other was not. Our findings demonstrate that surgical face masks impair the ability of humans, and naïve face recognition systems, to perform perceptual face matching tasks. Identification decisions for masked faces should be treated with caution.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.