The Impact of Face Mask Use on Research Evaluations of 5-7 Year-Old Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Masks during testing drag down face and emotion scores for young kids with autism more than for typical peers—adjust your setup or note the condition.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team watched 5- to 7-year-olds with and without autism try to name faces and feelings.
Half the kids saw pictures while the tester wore a blue surgical mask. The other half saw the same pictures with no mask.
Everyone took the same two tests: one for remembering faces, one for reading emotions like happy or mad.
What they found
Masks hurt both groups, but in different ways.
Typical kids still knew who the face was, yet they mixed up the feelings.
Kids with autism forgot both the face and the feeling when the mouth was covered.
How this fits with other research
Gastgeb et al. (2009) already showed that people with autism struggle to build an "average" face in their head. The new study adds that hiding the lower half makes the problem worse right away.
Chen et al. (2019) found Chinese preschoolers with autism could beat peers at reading printed characters. That strength did not carry over to reading faces under masks, so visual talent in ASD can be material-specific.
Schertz et al. (2016) saw kids with Down syndrome lose track of action order; the masked-face study shows a similar drop for kids with autism, but for faces instead of events.
Why it matters
If you test face memory or emotion skills while you or the child wears a mask, expect lower scores that may not reflect true ability. Drop the mask, use clear shields, or give extra mouth-area photos before you start. Note "mask on" in your data so future BCBAs know why scores look different.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
With the outburst of the COVID-19 pandemic, disposable surgical face-masks (DSFMs) have been widely adopted as a preventive measure. DSFMs hide the bottom half of the face, thus making identity and emotion recognition very challenging, both in typical and atypical populations. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are often characterized by face processing deficits; thus, DSFMs could pose even a greater challenge for this population compared to typically development (TD) individuals. In this study, 48 ASDs of level 1 and 110 TDs underwent two tasks: (i) the Old-new face memory task, which assesses whether DSFMs affect face learning and recognition, and (ii) the Facial affect task, which explores DSFMs' effect on emotion recognition. Results from the former show that, when faces were learned without DSFMs, identity recognition of masked faces decreased for both ASDs and TDs. In contrast, when faces were first learned with DSFMs, TDs but not ASDs benefited from a "context congruence" effect, that is, faces wearing DSFMs were better recognized if learned wearing DSFMs. In addition, results from the Facial affect task show that DSFMs negatively impacted specific emotion recognition in both TDs and ASDs, although differentially between the two groups. DSFMs negatively affected disgust, happiness and sadness recognition in TDs; in contrast, ASDs performance decreased for every emotion except anger. Overall, our study demonstrates a general, although different, disruptive effect on identity and emotion recognition both in ASD and TD population.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2026 · doi:10.1002/aur.2922