How can we recognize familiar people even while wearing a face mask?

The average person knows 5,000 faces - From family and friends to local store cashiers. Most people can easily identify well-known faces, even from low-quality images, or photos from many years old. We often recognize well-known faces even if we Can’t remember a person’s name Or how we know them. Most of us take this ability to recognize well-known faces lightly - but when public health issues require our friends to cover their chin, lips, cheeks, and nose, do our faces The ability to identify deteriorates?

We investigated this question Our recent study And compare the effect of masks (which cover the lower part of the face) to sunglasses (which cover the area of ​​the eye). Despite the face masks that cover the bulk of our faces, we found that people found it surprisingly easy to recognize the well-known faces behind the mask - so to speak, for the remarkable versatility of this human skill.

familiar faces

Identifying familiar faces is a useful daily skill, but is also important in the context of identifying unfamiliar faces. Forensic investigation And Security scenario. Our study measured the identity of both familiar and unfamiliar faces.

We presented our participants with pairs of facial images, and asked them to decide whether the faces belonged to the same person or different people. One image of the pair was always presented without any concealment, and the other showed either no concealment, an image in sunglasses, or a face mask. Participants completed tasks for familiar faces (portraits of celebrities) and unfamiliar faces.

Even though face masks cover an important part of the face, we found that our participants identified familiar faces in the mask Around 90 percent accuracy - No worse than the consequences of faces wearing sunglasses, and only slightly worse than concealed faces.

These results demonstrate how strong familiar facial recognition can be. And our task consisted only of comparing static images of faces. It is possible that in the real world, information from Body or gait Or can complement the information masked off the face with clothes, further increasing the accuracy

For unfamiliar faces, both masks and sunglasses further reduced detection accuracy. The face masks underperformed the display, but only slightly more than sunglasses. But with or without masks and sunglasses, it is usually difficult to identify unfamiliar faces and error prone.

Nevertheless, some people are highly skilled in this task. Super-identifier - People who excel Recognize faces - was also recruited to complete the works by Professor Josh Davis of the University of Greenwich Face and Voice Recognition Lab Database. Super-identifiers were also influenced by masks, But they performed far better than regular people.n All concealment conditions.

Given that the ability to recognize familiar faces was scarcely low when the face was masked, why is it that humans recognize well-known faces so well? Man can be born with a with Innate preference For facial-like stimuli. We are so accustomed to looking for faces in our environment that we often pick up patterns similar to faces within objects or clouds - a phenomenon known as “face peridolia”.

It has been suggested that face processing is adaptive - that our ancestors had Evolutionary advantage If they can tell the difference between a friend and an enemy, that will help them decide who to contact and whom to avoid.

The ability to recognize well-known faces is attributed to Learning different ways That the same face can see different encounters, and Learning how the face is different from other known faces. It removes unrecognized facial recognition more challenging, Because these factors are unknown to a face of which we have little experience. For unfamiliar faces, we do not know how the face changes during changes in posture, gestures, illumination, or age - or how the face differs from other unknown faces.

Expert identifier

How can this explain our surprisingly efficient performance in identifying mask-covered faces? For familiar faces, we are likely to have sufficient experience with faces that we can identify based on limited available information. We may have previously seen faces obscured, or our representation of the entire face is so strong that we can handle a decrease in visual characteristics.

Conversely, for unfamiliar faces, we cannot rely on experience with faces. Super-identifiers are anomalies here and, although it is unclear why they are so good at identifying faces, there is evidence that facial recognition capabilities may occur. Genetic.

There are currently 7.4 billion faces on the planet. Although we will never encounter only a small fraction of them, our ability to remember and recognize familiar faces is an evolutionary skill that has hundreds of thousands of years in the making. Our research suggests that this is a skill that is barely affected when the faces in question are hidden by a mask.

Eilidh Noyce, Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology, Huddersfield University; Katie Gray, Associate Professor, School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, and K. Ritchie, Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology, University of Lincoln

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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