Abstract
The current study aims to investigate the effects of masks on the discrimination of facial identity and emotional expressions in younger and older adults. Masks that occlude the lower half of the face should impair the discrimination of disgust and happiness, which rely largely on visual structure near the mouth. However, masks may affect identification differently in younger and older adults: young adults rely strongly on informative structure near the eyes for face identification, whereas older adults are less specifically reliant on the eye region for face identification. Using a Garner Interference Task, participants judged if two female faces presented sequentially showed different persons (identity task) or different emotional expressions (emotion task). Faces were randomly shown in three blocked conditions: unmasked faces, faces with the lower half covered by a surgical mask, or faces with features in the lower half removed. Obscuring the lower half of the face, by mask or removal, significantly impaired emotion perception in both age groups. Face identification was more accurate in younger adults than older adults in all conditions, but masks affected performance differently in two age groups. Specifically, obscuring the lower half improved identification in older adults, but did not significantly impact performance in younger observers. These results suggest that masks may affect social communication differently in younger and older adults.