Face Masks Disrupt Holistic Processing and Face Perception in School-Age Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Face perception is considered a remarkable visual ability in humans, which is subject to a prolonged developmental trajectory. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, mask-wearing has become mandatory for adults and children alike. However, previous research indicates its adverse effects on face recognition abilities in adults. The current study sought to explore the effect of masks on face processing abilities in school-age children given that face perception is not fully developed in this population. To this end, children (n = 72, ages 6-14 years old) completed the Cambridge Face Memory Test – Kids (CFMT-K), a validated measure of face perception performance. Faces were presented with or without masks and across two orientations (upright/inverted). The inclusion of face masks led to a profound deficit in face perception abilities. This decrement was more pronounced in children compared to adults, despite adjustment of task difficulty across the two age groups. Additionally, children exhibited reliable correlations between age and the CFMT score for upright faces for both the mask and no-mask conditions. Finally, as previously observed in adults, children also showed qualitative changes in the processing of masked faces. Specifically, holistic processing, a hallmark of face perception, was disrupted for masked faces, as suggested by a reduced face-inversion effect. Together, these findings provide evidence for substantial quantitative and qualitative alterations in the processing of masked faces in school-age children.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".