The impact of facial occlusions on the efficiency of facial recognition

Abstract

The Covid-19 Pandemic resulted in surgical masks becoming mandatory in many countries to slow the spread of the virus. Research has shown that surgical masks reduce the efficiency of facial recognition. This study aims to investigate this effect further, more specifically to investigate if surgical masks inhibit holistic processing by conducting a visual search experiment. To do this, an online task with images of faces as stimuli was designed, and subsequently completed by 24 participants. The visual search trials varied in terms of set size, stimulus orientation, and presence of a surgical mask. These three variables allowed for face perception efficiency and the inversion effect to be measured. There was a clear reduction in efficiency for the upright masked trials when compared to the upright unmasked trials. In addition to this, the inversion effect of the masked trials was markedly smaller than the inversion effect of the unmasked trials. These findings confirm that surgical masks reduce the efficiency of facial recognition, but also that this is the result of holistic processing being interrupted. These findings add to a very small body of research on surgical masks and holistic processing.