Department of Psychology & Psychological Assessment and Clinical Research Unit, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR, China.
Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR, China.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2022 Jul 22;7(1):64. doi: 10.1186/s41235-022-00407-4.
Use of face masks is one of the measures adopted by the general community to stop the transmission of disease during this ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This wide use of face masks has indeed been shown to disrupt day-to-day face recognition. People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have predisposed impairment in face recognition and are expected to be more vulnerable to this disruption in face recognition. Here, we recruited typically developing adult participants and those with ASD, and we measured their non-verbal intelligence, autism spectrum quotient, empathy quotient, and recognition performances of faces with and without a face mask covering the lower halves of the face. When faces were initially learned unobstructed, we showed that participants had a general reduced face recognition performance for masked faces. In contrast, when masked faces were first learned, typically developing adults benefit with an overall advantage in recognizing both masked and unmasked faces; while adults with ASD recognized unmasked faces with a significantly more reduced level of performance than masked faces-this face recognition discrepancy is predicted by a higher level of autistic traits. This paper also discusses how autistic traits influence processing of faces with and without face masks.
口罩的使用是普通大众在当前 COVID-19 大流行期间阻止疾病传播的措施之一。这种广泛使用口罩确实已经被证明会干扰日常的面部识别。患有自闭症谱系障碍 (ASD) 的人通常在面部识别方面存在先天障碍，预计他们更容易受到这种面部识别障碍的影响。在这里，我们招募了典型的成年参与者和 ASD 患者，并测量了他们的非言语智力、自闭症谱系商数、同理心商数以及面部和未戴口罩遮挡下半部分的面孔的识别表现。当最初不受阻碍地学习面孔时，我们发现参与者对面部识别的表现普遍降低。相比之下，当首次学习戴口罩的面孔时，典型的成年参与者在识别戴口罩和不戴口罩的面孔方面都具有整体优势；而患有 ASD 的成年人对面孔的识别表现明显低于戴口罩的面孔，这一差异是由更高的自闭症特征预测的。本文还讨论了自闭症特征如何影响对戴口罩和不戴口罩的面孔的处理。
