Investigating the impact of disposable surgical face-masks on face identity and emotion recognition in adults with autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

With the outburst of the COVID-19 pandemic, disposable surgical face-masks (DSFMs) have been widely adopted as a preventive measure. DSFMs hide the bottom half of the face, thus making identity and emotion recognition very challenging, both in typical and atypical populations. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are often characterized by face processing deficits; thus, DSFMs could pose even a greater challenge for this population compared to typically development (TD) individuals. In this study, 48 ASDs of level 1 and 110 TDs underwent two tasks: (i) the Old-new face memory task, which assesses whether DSFMs affect face learning and recognition, and (ii) the Facial affect task, which explores DSFMs' effect on emotion recognition. Results from the former show that, when faces were learned without DSFMs, identity recognition of masked faces decreased for both ASDs and TDs. In contrast, when faces were first learned with DSFMs, TDs but not ASDs benefited from a “context congruence” effect, that is, faces wearing DSFMs were better recognized if learned wearing DSFMs. In addition, results from the Facial affect task show that DSFMs negatively impacted specific emotion recognition in both TDs and ASDs, although differentially between the two groups. DSFMs negatively affected disgust, happiness and sadness recognition in TDs; in contrast, ASDs performance decreased for every emotion except anger. Overall, our study demonstrates a general, although different, disruptive effect on identity and emotion recognition both in ASD and TD population.