Department of Psychological, Health and Territorial Sciences, "G. d'Annunzio" University of Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy.
Department of Psychological, Health and Territorial Sciences, "G. d'Annunzio" University of Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy.
Neuropsychologia. 2022 Sep 9;174:108334. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108334. Epub 2022 Jul 15.
In the last two years, face-to-face interactions have drastically changed worldwide, because of the COVID-19 pandemic: the persistent use of masks has had the advantage of reducing viral transmission, but it has also had the cost of impacting on the perception and recognition of social information from faces, especially emotions. To assess the cerebral counterpart to this condition, we carried out an EEG experiment, extracting Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) evoked by emotional faces with and without surgical masks. Besides the expected impairment in emotion recognition in both accuracy and response times, also the classical face-related ERPs (N170 and P2) are altered by the presence of surgical masks. Importantly, the effect is stronger in individuals with a lower daily exposure to masks, suggesting that the brain must adapt to an extra constraint in decoding social input, due to masks hiding crucial facial information.
在过去的两年中，由于 COVID-19 大流行，全球范围内的面对面互动发生了巨大变化：持续使用口罩具有减少病毒传播的优势，但它也有影响对面部社会信息（尤其是情绪）的感知和识别的代价。为了评估这种情况的大脑对应物，我们进行了一项 EEG 实验，提取了有和没有手术口罩的情绪面孔诱发的事件相关电位（ERPs）。除了在准确性和反应时间上情绪识别的预期损伤外，经典的与面孔相关的 ERPs（N170 和 P2）也受到手术口罩的影响。重要的是，在每天接触口罩较少的个体中，这种影响更强，这表明大脑必须适应由于口罩隐藏了关键的面部信息而导致解码社交输入的额外限制。
