Your ID , please? The effect of Facemasks and Makeup on Perceptions of Age of Young Adult Female Faces

Different facets of age perception in people with developmental prosopagnosia and "super-recognisers"

The interplay between facial age and facial identity is evident from several scenarios experienced in daily life, such as when recognising a face several decades after the last exposure. However, the link between age and identity processing, and how age perception abilities might diverge in individuals with different face processing abilities, has scarcely been considered. Furthermore, the approach used to test age perception ability may also influence outcome, but the effect of different paradigms on performance is not yet known. Across three studies, we compare super-recognisers (SRs), people with developmental prosopagnosia (DPs), and a group of neurotypical controls, on three age perception paradigms. There were no differences on the numeric age estimation task (i.e. providing precise age estimates for a series of faces; Study 1), and numeric age estimation task with added noise-distortion to stimuli (Study 2). However, SRs were more accurate when instructed to classify ambient faces as either over- or under- the age of 18 compared to both DPs and controls (Study 3). Thus, there may be nuanced differences in age processing which can be tapped into using separate paradigms; however, given that the difference is only with SRs it remains unclear to what extent these are linked to facial identity processing.

Expressions of emotions in minimal face perception stimuli

Face perception is considered to be a canonical example of configurational visual processing. However, not all facial information is equally important when reading facial expressions. The eyes and mouth seem to be crucial, but they seem to have different roles and significance. By varying the shape of the mouth, eyes, and other factors, we conducted two experiments: first, we examined eye movements depending on different facial configurations and different types of instructions (neutral and emotionally valenced); second, we used the same types of stimuli in a rating task. Our results indicate that the eyes provide a primary impact (when eye fixations are measured), which can be explained by the evolutionary need to establish gaze contact, but once facial expressions are observed, the mouth seems to be more significant.

Face masks affect emotion categorisation, age estimation, recognition, and gender classification from faces

Although putting on a mask over our nose and mouth is a simple but powerful way to protect ourselves and others during a pandemic, face masks may interfere with how we perceive and recognize one another, and hence, may have far-reaching impacts on communication and social interactions. To date, it remains relatively unknown the extent to which wearing a face mask that conceals the bottom part of the face affects the extraction of different facial information. To address this question, we compared young adults' performance between masked and unmasked faces in four different tasks: (1) emotion recognition task, (2) famous face recognition and naming test, (3) age estimation task, and (4) gender classification task. Results revealed that the presence of face mask has a negative impact on famous face recognition and emotion recognition, but to a smaller extent on age estimation and gender classification tasks. More interestingly, we observed a female advantage in the famous face recognition and emotion recognition tasks and a female own-gender bias in gender categorisation and age estimation tasks. Overall, these findings allude to the lack of malleability of the adulthood face recognition and perceptual systems.