Discover Top Posts Tagged with #face cognition

Miniproject 3: Faces

A classmate referred me to an intriguing hypothesis in studies of face cognition called the “uncanny valley.” The term refers to a repeatedly observed phenomenon involving study subjects’ reactions to different faces ranging from total human likeness to faces totally inhuman. It is found that at the precipice of total human likeness—when a face almost resembles a human one—there is a statistically massive drop in positive reaction. Simply, people tend to be deeply perturbed, more so than anywhere else on the scale, by faces that approximate human form but barely miss it. At the very least, this is testament to our incredibly fine-tuned mental processes.

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I keep coming across this image:

Purportedly, these illustrations represent "ideal" human faces (female and male) based on geometry derived from the golden ratio. To begin with, I personally think the faces look sort of awkward and feel racially biased, and anyway I think that trying to overlay the golden ratio on everything is ultimately a hollow and silly pursuit. But they look pretty funny.

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This file has been kicking around my computer for a while...