The impact of face masks on autistic and non-autistic adults’ face processing abilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Atypical emotion recognition is argued to be characteristic of autism spectrum conditions (ASC), underpinned in part by atypical eye gaze, with less eye contact and more gaze direction towards the mouth. Given the widespread adoption of face masks due to the Covid-19 pandemic, exploring the effect of face masks on face processing in autism, as they occlude the mouth region, is of interest. This study investigated the impact of face masks on emotion and identity recognition, with a non-autistic ( N = 50) and autistic ( N = 27) sample. Participants also completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale, and the abridged Autism Quotient, to investigate the roles of alexithymia and autistic traits in any impacts of face masks on face processing abilities. Masks were detrimental to performance for both autistic and non-autistic groups, and masks affected participants’ performance on the emotion recognition task more than the identity recognition task. Autistic participants’ performance was more negatively affected by the presence of masks, affecting emotion recognition precision in particular. The impact of face masks was not predicted by alexithymia or autistic traits, after gender and age were taken into account. Overall, the results suggest that masks negatively affect face processing for both non-autistic and autistic groups, particularly emotion recognition, however the impact of masks is amplified for autistic people. These results supplement autistic people’s reports that masks interfere with social interactions. • Previous research suggests autistic people show atypical eye gaze patterns to others’ eyes and mouths. • Facemasks occlude the mouth region, and could disproportionately affect autistic people’s face processing abilities. • We examined face processing abilities when stimuli did and did not have masks, with autistic and non-autistic adults. • Both groups were negatively impacted by masks, and emotion recognition was more affected than identity recognition. • Autistic participants were more negatively affected by masks than non-autistic people, especially with regards to emotion recognition precision. Alexithymia and autistic traits did not predict the impact of masks.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".