The effect of covering parts of male and female face pictures on age estimation

Abstract

Literature has shown faces are an important source of information to evaluate someone's age. However, it has not been fully understood how much each part of a face affects estimating his/her age and whether the face's gender affects it. Particularly, wearing sanitary masks has been too common during the COVID-19 pandemic to ignore its effect on our ability to age estimation. This study aimed to explore how masking any part of the face, i.e., forehead, eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth, affects age estimation with 33 undergraduate and graduate students. Participants were parallelly presented a facial picture each at a time along with the picture with a part of the face covered by a black rectangle, and asked for the age difference between the pictures. Results showed that participants evaluated both male and female pictures looked older in the eyes covered condition than in the other conditions, but there was sex difference in age estimation: Participants evaluated the female pictures with their forehead, nose, or mouth covered by the rectangles younger than the pictures with full face but no such effect was found for the male pictures. These findings suggest that parts of faces and their gender affect differently in age estimation, and women wearing sanitary masks could look younger than they are due to the cover of their noses and areas around mouths.