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Although effective in reducing virus transmission, face masks might compromise face recognition and trait judgments. With this study, we aimed to observe the influence of masks on face recognition and trait judgments—more specifically, in trustworthiness, dominance, and distinctiveness judgments. Also, we wanted to observe the possible influence of trait judgments on facial recognition for masked and unmasked faces, which has never been done before. For that, we conducted an online study where 140 participants observed and made trait judgments of masked and unmasked faces in a within-subjects design. After a distractive task, participants performed a recognition memory test. As expected, we observed a better recognition of faces shown without a mask during the study phase, which allowed the holistic processing of the faces. The worst performance was found for faces encoded with a mask but tested without it, occurring simultaneity disruption in holistic face processing and the violation of the encoding specificity principle. Regarding the trait judgments, unmasked faces were considered more distinctive, and masked faces were considered more trustworthy. More interestingly, we can conclude that facial distinctiveness predicts face recognition, regardless of mask use. In contrast, dominance judgments only predicted face recognition when faces were presented without a mask. When faces were exposed with masks, trustworthiness overrides dominance, becoming more critical to recognizing faces. We can interpret these results from an evolutionary perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on familiar faces has been conducted in different countries and resort to celebrities faces, stimuli that are highly constrained by geographic context and cultural peculiarities, since many celebrities are only famous in particular countries. Despite their relevance to psychological research, there are no normative studies of celebrities' facial recognition in Portugal. We developed a database with 160 black and white pictures of famous persons' faces in this work. The data collection took place in two different studies. In study 1, participants were asked to recognize and name celebrity faces; while in study 2, celebrity names were rated for AoA, familiarity, and distinctiveness. Data were gathered from two different samples of Portuguese young adults aged between 18 and 25 years old, and both procedures were performed online through a questionnaire created in Qualtrics software. This database provides ratings of AoA, familiarity, facial distinctiveness, recognition rate, and naming rate for each celebrity, which will allow further selection of celebrities, based on these five attributes, for studies using Portuguese samples. Also, possible relationships between these five variables were analyzed and presented, highlighting facial distinctiveness as a predictor for both naming and recognition rate of celebrity faces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]