Partial face visibility and facial cognition: event-related potential and eye tracking investigation

Face masks became a part of everyday life during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Previous studies showed that the face cognition mechanism involves holistic face processing, and the absence of face features could lower the cognition ability. This is opposed to the experience during the pandemic, when people could correctly recognize faces, although the mask covered a part of the face. This paper clarifies the partial face cognition mechanism of the full and partial faces based on the electroencephalogram (EEG) and eye-tracking data. We observed two event-related potentials, P3a in the frontal lobe and P3b in the parietal lobe, as subcomponents of P300. The amplitude of both P3a and P3b were lowered when the eyes were invisible, and the amplitude of P3a evoked by the nose covered was larger than the full face. The eye-tracking data showed that 16 out of 18 participants focused on the eyes associated with the EEG results. Our results demonstrate that the eyes are the most crucial feature of facial cognition. Moreover, the face with the nose covered might enhance cognition ability due to the visual working memory capacity. Our experiment also shows the possibility of people recognizing faces using both holistic and structural face processing. In addition, we calculated canonical correlation using the P300 and the total fixation duration of the eye-tracking data. The results show high correlation in the cognition of the full face and the face and nose covered ( $$ ) which resembles the masked face. The finding suggests that people can recognize the masked face as well as the full face in similar cognition patterns.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11571-025-10231-3.