ArticleScientific reports2023
Face masks are less effective than sunglasses in masking face identity.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 12 citations in OpenAlex.
- The links between direct gaze and social cognition - implications for impression accuracy and joint attention.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Facial feature representations in visual working memory: A reverse correlation study.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
- Comprehensive comparison between vision transformers and convolutional neural networks for face recognition tasks.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- 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
6 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The effect of covering faces on face identification is recently garnering interest amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we investigated how face identification performance was affected by two types of face disguise: sunglasses and face masks. Observers studied a series of faces; then judged whether a series of test faces, comprising studied and novel faces, had been studied before or not. Face stimuli were presented either without coverings (full faces), wearing sunglasses covering the upper region (eyes, eyebrows), or wearing surgical masks covering the lower region (nose, mouth, chin). We found that sunglasses led to larger reductions in sensitivity (d') to face identity than face masks did, while both disguises increased the tendency to report faces as studied before, a bias that was absent for full faces. In addition, faces disguised during either study or test only (i.e. study disguised faces, test with full faces; and vice versa) led to further reductions in sensitivity from both studying and testing with disguised faces, suggesting that congruence between study and test is crucial for memory retrieval. These findings implied that the upper region of the face, including the eye-region features, is more diagnostic for holistic face-identity processing than the lower face region.
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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.