It has been a while since masks were introduced to protect against Covid19, and recently I began to experience its bizarre result.  Mask mandates encompass the lower half of the face – nose, mouth, cheeks and chin, leaving only expressive eyes.  Yet my memory of mask-wearing strangers would consist of their complete face, without ever having seen it.  Recent studies explain how masks affect our perception of faces (Freud et al., 2020), but I could find no research on “phantom face” application to those already masked.  To compensate, I invoked cognitive psychology concepts to explain.

First is the Phonemic Restoration Effect, a language perception skill of filling in missing phonemes – the smallest unit of speech denoting meaning such as a letter, and morphemes – units of phonemes comprising words and phrases – against a backdrop of atmospheric noise, based on phrase context.  Our minds are so good at deciphering linguistic elements in the midst of clamor that if the same were to be heard among silence we would understand it less (Wede, 2021).  Similarly, visual perception may complete the missing parts of a face among the obscuring visual “noise” of its mask, per visible portions.  Visualizing demands Mental Imagery – the sensing of stimuli in its physical absence, such as an object via visual, music via auditory or scent via olfactory images (Goldstein, 2015, p. 276).  Mental Imagery uses Prior Knowledge – environmental items we have encountered, in order to make the kind of Inferences – assumptions about new information based on past experience (Goldstein, 2015, p. 222), that we would need to create a phantom face.  Environmental knowledge can consist of semantic and physical regularities – usual details in scenes or repetitive contours in nature, we have come across, respectively (Goldstein, 2015, p. 67-68), like that of facial qualities seen since birth.

Reminiscence of “phantom” visual imagery requires Constructive Memory, a function of long-term memory to which stimuli over 20 seconds is shunted (Goldstein, 2015, p. 127).  Contrary to popular belief, memory is not like playing back a video, but a delicate medium built using extraneous data, subject to change (upon reenactment with alternate data) (Goldstein, 2015, p. 199).  Thus we can infuse facial ingredient facts as we assemble retrieved memory of our masked individual.  Which type of face to apply?  A Prototype:  The system we use to organize information, a median of the most typical items in the category of faces we know of, to exemplify a most appropriate match for the gender, body shape, height and even voice of this masked stranger.  Or better yet, the more exacting Exemplar – a specific or unusual prototype we have seen before (Goldstein, 2015, p. 253) such as the face of a friend, to construct upon this envisioned outsider.

None of this facial perception or imagery would be possible without gift of the Fusiform Face Area (FFA) Imagery Neurons, a location of brain cells to which only the viewing of faces excites.  The FFA receives help from other areas of our brain such as the frontal cortex, to evaluate the attractiveness, gaze direction and emotional expression of the face in question (Goldstein, 2015, p. 73).  Neurons responding to live faces also do the same toward facial visual imagery (Goldstein, 2015, p. 287), just as they would to our phantom face.

So, in a symphony of the above concepts perchance inventing the phantom face, the brain’s FFA uses mental visual imagery to construct a memory, which then restores missing facial features based on the prototype or exemplar of its prior knowledge of facial regularities, in order to place a freshly crafted face upon our newly met, masked individual.

References:

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Freud, E., Stajduhar, A., Rosenbaum, R.S., Avidan, G., Ganel, T.  (2020).  The COVID-19 pandemic masks the way people perceive faces.  Scientific Reports, 10, Article 22344.  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-78986-9

Wede, J.  (2021).  Temporal induction of speech: multiple phonemic restoration by noise [Video].  Pennsylvania State University World Campus.  https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2130474/modules/items/33027149

Goldstein, E. B.  (2015).  Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (4th ; student ed.).  Cengage Learning