Faculty Colloquium
Publication Date
9-17-2024
Description
In Fall 2020 and subsequent semesters, faculty at Bucknell experienced an unusual scenario — teaching classes in person to an audience of masked students. Despite this unusual context, we learned to recognize our masked students without much difficulty. Instead, the trouble came when we would see students outside the classroom without their masks. Anecdotal reports indicated that faculty and students alike would fail to recognize someone they knew quite well in a masked context. Somehow, seeing more of the face led to poorer recognition. Even more puzzling was that some faces were more prone to this ‘unmasking interference’ than others. In this talk, Professor Mitchel presents a series of experiments investigating this peculiar, yet ubiquitous phenomenon to try to better understand why removing a mask would interfere with recognition more than adding a mask.
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Article
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