Faces are one of the most important visual stimuli in human perception. Just because you look at your "face" more in the crowd, you can get a lot of social related information, such as the other person's race, age, gender and emotional state. Since the covid-19 epidemic, masks have become a must-have in people's daily lives. Recent studies have shown that wearing masks hinders adults' facial processing abilities, including the ability to recognize facial identity, emotional expression, and recognition of sounds, but the study did not explore whether this phenomenon also applies to school-age children. So researchers at York University and Ben-Gurion University conducted a new study of 72 children ages 6 to 14 to see if their experiences were similar to those of adults, published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications Implications) magazine.
People usually treat the face as a whole when they perceive it. Previous studies have shown that children's facial perception develops slowly in the early stages, rapidly between the ages of 4 and 11, and reaches levels similar to those of adults during puberty. Considering the gradual improvement of facial perception from early childhood to adolescence, the researchers predict that children will be negatively affected by masks similar to or even more than adults.
The study used the Cambridge Face Memory Test for Kids (CFKT-K) to generate an adjusted version of the test with a mask. Children are randomly assigned to wear and don't wear masks, and recognize faces as the difficulty increases. To explore the overall processing of faces with and without masks, each participant completed two tests, one for the face and one for the face upside down.
The results of the study show that when people wear masks, children's facial perception ability is not only severely impaired, but even more seriously damaged than adults. The study also found that when children saw faces obscured, they handled faces differently than they did when they were not wearing masks. The ability to process faces as a whole is very important for facial perception, and this ability is destroyed after wearing a mask.
"If overall processing and cognitive abilities are impaired, it has the potential to impair a child's ability to socially interact with peers or teachers, which can affect children's ability to build relationships with others." Erez Freud, the study's author, said, "Because the human face is important in social interactions, we need to be aware of this." Now that children are returning to school wearing masks again, future research should explore the social and psychological impact of wearing masks on children's learning and daily lives. ”