During the COVID pandemic, my son had his critical years of development as a child. At the same time, at my job, we were trying to make our facial recognition algorithm work with people wearing masks (and we succeeded). Which made me think.
If the neural networks we use for facial recognition are similar to how our brain works, will my son be better at recognizing people in masks when he grows up? He and his generation have seen a lot more people in masks (during some time it was the majority of people) than my peers. So he should be better at it because his “training data” was biased in that way.
I am not sure if he will, but this would be a nice research topic.