Image Recognition
Babies learn by looking at human faces, so many parents and childhood experts are concerned about the developmental consequences of widespread face-masking during the pandemic. A new study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, allays those concerns, finding that 6- to 9-month-old babies can form memories of masked faces and recognize those faces when unmasked. Because babies linger longer over unfamiliar images, the researchers could derive which faces they recognized, DeBolt said. “When babies learned a masked face, and then they saw that face again unmasked, they recognized it,” DeBolt said. However, when the order was reversed, babies did not show strong recognition of masked faces that they first saw unmasked.