Children aren't as good at recognizing masked faces as adults, study finds

Dr. Tom Frieden weighs in on what's next after the Omicron variant. Children have a more difficult time recognizing faces that are masked than adults, which could harm their ability to "navigate through social interactions with their peers and teachers," according to a newly released study. Erez Freud, a researcher at York University, who published his findings on Monday in the journal Cognitive Research: Principles & Implications. Freud, along with two professors from Israel's Ben-Gurion University, gave 72 children between the ages of 6 and 14 the Cambridge Face Memory Test, which measures facial perception abilities by presenting people with and without masks while upright and inverted. When masks were included in the presentation, it led to a "profound deficit in face perception abilities" that was "more pronounced in children compared to adults," according to the study.