Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We examined whether mask use had differential impacts on face and facial expression recognition across cultures, as cultures associated with more eyes-focused face scanning strategies may be less affected. Asian and White participants performed face and facial expression recognition with unmasked and masked Asian and White faces. White participants attended more to the eye region in both tasks; however, their performance was less impaired by mask use only in facial expression recognition. In both tasks, individuals adopting more eyes-focused strategies for unmasked faces were less impaired by mask use. Also, participants had larger performance impairment for judging expressions of Asian than White faces, consistent with the finding that they adopted more nose-focused strategies for Asian than White faces. Thus, although individuals from different cultures or expression recognition of different races may be affected differentially by mask use, these effects may be better explained by individual differences in preferred attention strategies.