Face mask reduces gaze-cueing effect.

Sci Rep

Institute of Brain and Psychological Sciences, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, 610068, People's Republic of China.

Published: August 2023

AI Article Synopsis

  • Recent studies indicate that face masks influence social cognition and behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly affecting how we respond to eye gaze cues.
  • In an experiment, masked faces produced a smaller gaze-cueing effect at a short time interval (300 ms) compared to non-masked faces, while both types had similar effects at a longer interval (1000 ms).
  • Another experiment showed that covering the mouth didn't significantly alter gaze-cueing effects, suggesting that the reduced effect from masked faces is tied to the social implications of wearing a mask rather than just the physical obstruction.

Article Abstract

Recent studies have found that face masks affect social cognition and behaviour in the context of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The eyes, the only part of the face not covered by face masks, are an important spatial attention cue that can trigger social attention orienting. Here, we adopted a spatial gaze-cueing task to investigate whether face masks affect social attention orienting triggered by eye gaze cues. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to determine the orientation of a target line under two types of cues-masked and non-masked faces-and two stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) conditions (300 ms and 1000 ms). The results showed that masked faces induced a smaller gaze-cueing effect (GCE) compared to non-masked faces at 300 ms SOA, while two face types induced similar GCEs at 1000 ms SOA. Experiment 2 used mouth-obscured faces and non-masked faces as cues and found that no significant difference in GCE between the two types at either 300 ms or 1000 ms SOA, indicating that the reduction of GCE caused by the masked face was due to the social meaning expressed by the mask rather than a physical effect of masking. The present study extends previous findings to support the idea that high-level social information affects the processing of eye gaze direction and provides evidence that face masks affect social cognition and behaviour in the context of COVID-19.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10423210PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-40195-5DOI Listing

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