Abstract
Face perception is a fundamental aspect of social cognition and shapes human interaction by guiding behavior and allowing individuals to extract and interpret information on identity and emotional states. How accessories such as eyeglasses may impact face recognition, however, has not been thoroughly studied. Here in a visual search task, we asked 28 participants to detect the presence of the face of one celebrity among a set of distractor faces from another celebrity (e.g., whether the face of Tom Cruise is present among the faces of Brad Pitt). A total of five different celebrity identities were included. The face images were shown either without glasses, with glasses placed in the eye region, or with glasses placed in the nose region for both the target and distractor faces. Search speed was significantly slower when glasses were present, regardless of their position, compared to when they were absent. Placing glasses on a face thus made it more difficult to extract the identity of the face. To understand whether the presence of glasses would also alter face identity representation, from the pairwise target-distractor search speed, we performed representational similarity analysis and found that the presence of glasses significantly changed the perceived similarity among the faces. Together, these results show that the presence of glasses not only hinders people’s ability to extract the identities of familiar faces but also changes how these faces may be perceived. Our study contributes to our knowledge of how glasses or disguise-intended accessories may impact face perception in the real world.