The Judgment of Masked Facial Expressions by Humans and Classifiers

Abstract

We examined brain activity in response to facial expressions wearing masks. N170 responses at the T5 and T6 sites were synchronized with the vertex positive potential (VPP) response at the Cz site, and the N170 responses were increased under masked conditions, which may be associated with amodal completion. The facial emotion recognizer as a general classifier was then tested for predicting masked facial expressions. This classifier’s accuracies were greatly lower for faces with masks than without masks.