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View Full Version : tPF Study: Brain Falters To Recognize Others In Face Masks



Sybil Ludington
12-24-2020, 01:16 PM
Normal but very necessary human social interaction is broken as people fail to recognize, hear and communicate with others. The stressors placed on global society will lead to conflicts at all levels, from family breakups to civil and national wars. ⁃ TN Editor


As the coronavirus pandemic drags on, putting on a face mask (https://www.studyfinds.org/tag/face-masks/) has become as second nature to people as putting on pants. While it may be helping to limit of the virus’s spread (https://www.studyfinds.org/which-mask-is-best-for-keeping-covid-19-away-new-research-says-use-cotton-cloth/), scientists say it’s also made it much harder to figure out who’s actually standing next to us in public. Researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev say face masks are lowering the brain’s ability to properly recognize and distinguish between different faces.


“For those of you who don’t always recognize a friend (https://www.studyfinds.org/remembering-names-easier-remembering-faces-study-finds/) or acquaintance wearing a mask, you are not alone,” the research team says in a media release (https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-12/aabu-dik121820.php).


“Faces are among the most informative and significant visual stimuli in human perception and play a unique role in communicative, social daily interactions. The unprecedented effort to minimize COVID-19 transmission has created a new dimension in facial recognition due to mask wearing.”


Prof. Tzvi Ganel from BGU and Prof. Erez Freud from York University in Toronto examined how wearing a mask interferes with a person’s ability to recognize faces. Using a version of the Cambridge Face Memory Test, nearly 500 people tested their facial perception while looking at masked and unmasked faces.


The results reveal wearing a mask decreases a person’s ability to successfully tell who someone is by 15 percent.


continued:
https://www.technocracy.news/study-brain-falters-to-recognize-others-in-face-masks/