The Effect of Face Masks on the Recognition of Own- and Other-Race Faces

The other race-effect (ORE), the tendency to identify more accurately own- than other-race faces, is typically attributed to diminished holistic or configural processing for other-race faces. However, other accounts suggest that the ORE can be mediated when observers specifically focus on particular facial features. For example, Black observers do not show an ORE for White faces when they attend to the eye region. This study examines these accounts when surgical face masks naturally occlude the lower region of the face, which may both disrupt holistic processing and facilitate or hamper selective feature processing, dependent on the race of the face. Overall, our experiments showed that face masks disrupted the identification of both own- and other-race faces. In addition, internal meta-analyses showed that this effect was slightly larger for own- than other-race faces, providing more support for the holistic processing account of the ORE.