Masks have been a necessity and a must-have when going out of the house today because of the worldwide pandemic, COVID 19. Unknown to most, wearing masks disrupts our way of perceiving and recognizing familiar faces. This has been a challenge that is common to us amid the pandemic.
Our face is among the most informative and essential aspects of our perception. With the emergence of the pandemic, almost everyone outside has started wearing masks. This event has created a stir in our ability of facial recognition.
Noted professors, Professor Ganel and Professor Freud from Ben-Gurion University of the Neveg (BGN) in Israel conducted research and an experiment to determine how wearing masks have influenced our ability to recognize faces.
They modified the Cambridge Face Memory Test and executed an online experiment with a group of subjects comprising of 500 people. The results of their investigation indicate that our ability to determine faces of individuals wearing masks reduced to about 15%.
Because of the reduced accuracy of determining faces, we have changed our facial recognition way into a more time consuming and less accurate method. This change directly impacts our social interactions with people who wear masks.