Just human things.
An averted glance gives a glimpse of the mind behind the eyes
Aug 2020, phys.org
The amount of stuff our brain does without our even thinking about it, is unfathomable:
In almost all cases, people instinctually follow the gaze of another. But psychologists found an exception in the socially awkward situation where a person caught staring averts their eyes: A third-party observer does not reflexively follow their gaze. (Which means they know, albeit unconsciously.)The researchers conclude that the brain tells the observer that there is no significance to the location where the embarrassed party has turned their attention."The brain is a lot smarter than we thought," said Yale's Brian Scholl, professor of psychology and senior author of the paper.via: Clara Colombatto el al., "Gaze deflection reveals how gaze cueing is tuned to extract the mind behind the eyes," PNAS (2020). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2010841117
Why the brain is programmed to see faces in everyday objects
Aug 2020, phys.org
They tested this using the process known as "sensory adaptation," a kind of visual illusion where one's perception is affected by what has recently been seen:"If you are repeatedly shown pictures of faces that are looking towards your left, for example, your perception will actually change over time so that the faces will appear to be looking more rightwards than they really are," says Dr. Palmer.via: Colin J. Palmer et al. Face Pareidolia Recruits Mechanisms for Detecting Human Social Attention, Psychological Science (2020). DOI: 10.1177/0956797620924814
^Somewhat related to right angle bias?
Study of ancient Mayan facial expressions suggests some are universal
Aug 2020 phys.org
There's a good paradox about whether human facial expressions are universal. Would a person from across the world understand you just by your facial expression? The paradox is that in order to do this study, a human observer has to be involved, which means they're biased, because they are part of a culture that has programmed their brain since birth to see things a certain way. But not robots. They aren't born at all!
Just kidding, they used English-speaking mechanical turks to label photos of Mayan sculptures. The turks agreed on the photos.
via: Alan S. Cowen et al. Universal facial expressions uncovered in art of the ancient Americas: A computational approach, Science Advances (2020). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abb1005
Totally unrelated image credit: bushmeat, via tengwood.org
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