ArticleRoyal Society open science2021
The effect of face masks and sunglasses on identity and expression recognition with super-recognizers and typical observers.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 93 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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Who cites it
93 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 190 citations in OpenAlex.
- Face Processing in Early Development: A Systematic Review of Behavioral Studies and Considerations in Times of COVID-19 Pandemic.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Pooled it
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Training human super-recognizers' detection and discrimination of AI-generated faces.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Congruency effects and individual differences in masked face recognition under limited feature visibility.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Investigating the stability of individual differences in face recognition behavior.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Impact of face masks on empathy and communication in head and neck cancer patients: a case-control study.Frontiers in oncology · 2025Article
- Seeing emotions: an eye-tracking study of emotion recognition in deaf individuals amid facial occlusions.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Masked face matching benefits from isolated facial features.PloS one · 2025Article
- Challenges of face identification with varied mask coverage in the post COVID-19 era.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Inferring social signals from the eyes in male schizophrenia.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2024Article
- Emotion recognition in autism spectrum condition during the COVID-19 pandemic.Autism : the international journal of research and practice · 2024Article
- Face Feature Change Detection Ability in Developmental Prosopagnosia and Super-Recognisers.Brain sciences · 2024Article
- Decoding face recognition abilities in the human brain.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Face masks and fake masks: the effect of real and superimposed masks on face matching with super-recognisers, typical observers, and algorithms.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Article
- Accuracy and Speed of Emotion Recognition With Face Masks.Europe's journal of psychology · 2024Article
33 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Face masks present a new challenge to face identification (here matching) and emotion recognition in Western cultures. Here, we present the results of three experiments that test the effect of masks, and also the effect of sunglasses (an occlusion that individuals tend to have more experienced with) on (i) familiar face matching, (ii) unfamiliar face matching and (iii) emotion categorization. Occlusion reduced accuracy in all three tasks, with most errors in the mask condition; however, there was little difference in performance for faces in masks compared with faces in sunglasses. Super-recognizers, people who are highly skilled at matching unconcealed faces, were impaired by occlusion, but at the group level, performed with higher accuracy than controls on all tasks. Results inform psychology theory with implications for everyday interactions, security and policing in a mask-wearing society.
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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.