Using face masks to prevent the spread of respiratory infectious diseases has grown somewhat common in European countries since the COVID-19 pandemic. While it has been shown that people’s recognition memory for faces may be hindered when the to-be-recognized person wears a mask, it is unclear whether people can predict how face masks affect recognition memory for faces. The present study aimed to test metamemory for masked and unmasked faces through people’s judgments of learning (JOLs). Portuguese (Experiment 1a) and German (Experiment 1b) participants studied 48 faces (half masked, half unmasked) and made immediate JOLs for each. A distraction phase and a recognition task followed. Preliminary results revealed higher JOLs for unmasked faces than masked faces in both experiments. Then, we had German participants (Experiment 2) follow a similar procedure in which they did, however, know whether each face would appear at test with or without a mask. Preliminary results revealed the highest JOLs for faces that were unmasked at study and test, lowest JOLs for faces that were masked at test regardless of whether they were studied with or without a mask, and intermediate JOLs for faces that were masked at study but unmasked at test. Recogniton memory performance revealed a similar pattern. Together, these preliminary findings suggest that people’s JOLs for (un)masked faces are based on cues at the moment of encoding but consider the moment of future recognition; and that people are able to predict the effects of face masks on recognition memory for faces.

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metamemória,memória,faces,reconhecimento,covid-19

• Psychology - Social Sciences