ArticleFrontiers in psychology2022
The impact of COVID-19 on memory: Recognition for masked and unmasked faces.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Masked and elusive: congruency fails in video-to-photo face matching.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2026Article
- Mask dynamics in eye region-based person identification: Effects of mask removal and addition.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Congruency effects and individual differences in masked face recognition under limited feature visibility.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Masked face matching benefits from isolated facial features.PloS one · 2025Article
- The effect of surgical masks on identification decisions from masked and unmasked lineups.Psychiatry, psychology, and law : an interdisciplinary journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Considering the current state of the worldwide pandemic, it is still common to encounter people wearing face protection masks. Although a safety measure against COVID-19, face masks might be compromising our capacity for face recognition. We conducted an online study where 140 participants observed masked and unmasked faces in a within-subjects design and then performed a recognition memory task. The best performance was found when there were no masks either at study and test phase, i.e., at the congruent unmasked condition. The worst performance was found for faces encoded with a mask but tested without it (i.e., masked-unmasked incongruent condition), which can be explained by the disruption in holistic face processing and the violation of the encoding specificity principle. Interestingly, considering the unmasked-masked incongruent condition, performance was probably affected by the violation of the encoding specificity principle but protected by holistic processing that occurred during encoding.
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