Abstract

Psychologists agree that the human face is a rich source of social information: a quick glance at someone’s face suffices to capture our attention and to provide cues about their identity, affective states, spoken language, and first impression about character traits such as ‘trustworthiness’. But then, what happened when during the peak fo Covid-19 pandemics several people had to constantly cover the lower part of their face with a medical face mask? In this essay, I present and critically discuss some insights of the (massive) psychological literature on the perception of the masked face, focusing on the experiments conducted by my team. In particular, I discuss the effect of face masks on the aspects of face perception hinted above, namely face detection, identity recognition, emotion recognition, phono articulation, and impressions of trustworthiness