Evaluating the effectiveness of pixelation and blurring on masking the identity of familiar faces

Two experiments are reported that assess how well the identity of highly fa miliar (famous) faces can be masked from short naturalistic television clip s. Recognition of identity was made more difficult by either pixelating (Ex periment 1) or blurring (Experiment 2) the viewed face. Participants were a sked to identify faces from both moving and static clips. Results indicated that participants were still able to recognize some of the viewed faces, d espite these image degradations. In addition, moving images of faces were r ecognized better than static ones. The practical and theoretical implicatio ns of these findings are discussed. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, L td.