A new study has shown that not only do masks hinder the ability of children to recognize faces, but they also disrupt the typical, holistic way that faces are processed.
Researchers had children perform the CFMT-K, a facial memorization examination for kids, and discovered a substantial disparity among children examining unmasked faces and masked faces.
“The main findings from this paper are that children struggle to recognize masked faces. We found a decrease of 20 percent in their ability to recognize masked faces, while the average decline is around 15 percent for adults,” one among several researchers, Erez Freud, assistant professor in the Faculty of Health at York University in Canada, informed the press in an email.
Prior research has shown that masks impair adults' capacity to interpret faces. The new research (read below) is among the earliest to look at how masks affect children's facial identification ability.
For said study, 72 youngsters between the ages o...