Assemblages

Humans (left) were morphed with dolls to produce blended images (right). Turns out you need to be 2/3 parts human for people to think you're alive.

The poets and philosophers were right, the eyes really are the windows to the soul. Or at least what we perceive to be the soul. Researchers at Dartmouth College have studied how people respond to images of humans, dolls, and the morphed blending of the two to learn how realistic a face must be before we’ll consider it to be alive. Turns out that you have to be about two-thirds the way between human and doll (towards the human side) before people will stop thinking you’re an object and start treating you like a person. Not only did the Dartmouth scientists roughly determine the boundaries of the Uncanny Valley, they studied how subjects were making their decisions. Short answer: it’s all in the eyes. You can look at examples of the images that test subjects were asked to judge in the videos below. If you watch closely you can see a face go from caring to creepy to cute and back again all in a few seconds. Block out the eyes and it almost seems like you skip “creepy”. Cool.

The study was performed by Christine Looser, a Dartmouth PhD student, and her advisor Thalia Wheatley and appears in a recent issue of Psychological Science. Wheatley’s Lab examines a wide range of questions on how humans relate to one another. For this experiment, Looser took human faces and matched them to the faces of dolls that most closely resembled them. Then the two faces were morphed together with photo-altering software to produce a series of images that exist along the human-doll continuum. The following videos show two examples of what it would look like to scan across that continuum and back again. The subjects in the study, however, were shown still images.

Test subjects would look at a photo taken from the human-doll continuum and be asked if the picture shown was a doll or human. Two months later, the same subjects were asked to look at the same images and determine if the person shown had a mind. Looser and Wheatley found that images start to be perceived as human, and possessing a human mind, about 67% along the continuum. In other words, if a face gets any more doll-like than that, people will no longer believe it is alive.

A different experiment determined that test subjects looked longest at the image’s eyes, rather than the mouth, nose, or skin, before categorizing an image as human or doll. From that focus Wheatley and Looser suggest that the facial cues humans use to recognize living things are clustered around the eyes, though not necessarily on the eyeball itself. By studying those clues, humans are able to quickly determine if a face belongs to another person or if it’s simply something that looks like a face by accident. This discernning skill is what probably kept our evolutionary ancestors from talking to human-looking rocks while still being able to form bonds with their family members.

I always find this kind of psychological research fascinating, though I worry about certain limitations of the study. Let’s skip my general disapproval of using student volunteers as test subjects (ask me about this when you see me at a conference and we’ll discuss it for hours, trust me) and just focus on the breadth of the experiment. By design Looser and Wheatley were only interested in static visual cues. This ignores the importance of faces in motion (though they’ve looked at the human response to moving objects in other experiments), and doesn’t address audio input. A doll that appears 2/3 human is still going to be really creepy if it moves in a jerky way, or if it sounds like Stephen Hawking. Measuring when humans will accept a static image as a person is valuable data, but it’s only part of the understanding that we need.

Robotics engineers and digital artists struggle with creating realistic-looking artificial humans that viewers will respond to positively. Hollywood will typically make their characters cartoonish to avoid the Uncanny Valley, though recent attempts such as Avatar seemed to push the boundaries of what could be accomplished. With robots, the Uncanny Valley at times seems like an insurmountable obstacle – some of the life-like faces created seem almost acceptable while others will make your skin crawl for days.

Researchers like Looser and Wheatley have given us valuable insight into how we can create artificial people with which we can identify. However, there is still a lot of work to be done before we’ll be able to truly make robots and virtual characters appear more human than fake. Even then, it will take years before we can give them personalities that we will want to love. In the meantime, I think I’m going to work on creating an augmented reality iPhone program that removes the eyes from images of people. I’ll call it; “The Creepiest Freakin’ App You’ll Ever Own.” Should be a hot seller next October.

[image credits: Christine Looser/Dartmouth College]

[sources: Science News, Looser and Wheatley 2010 Psychological Science, Wheatley Lab]

Related Posts:

• Disturbingly Real Replicants from Hanson Robotics
• Actroid F Female Telepresence Robot Looks Super Real, Creepy
• Creepy but Very Life-Like Telepresence Replicant from Kokoro (video)
• Video Game Faces So Real, You Can Tell If They're Lying (Trailer)
• Telenoid - The Creepiest Telepresence Robot You'll Ever Love (video)

Tags: animacy, Christine Looser, creepy, human perception, Thalia Wheatley, uncanny valley

   Share    

 

Jim Jarmusch’s Golden Rules

by Jim Jarmusch | Published January 22, 2004

Rule #1: There are no rules. There are as many ways to make a film as there are potential filmmakers. It’s an open form. Anyway, I would personally never presume to tell anyone else what to do or how to do anything. To me that’s like telling someone else what their religious beliefs should be. Fuck that. That’s against my personal philosophy—more of a code than a set of “rules.” Therefore, disregard the “rules” you are presently reading, and instead consider them to be merely notes to myself. One should make one’s own “notes” because there is no one way to do anything. If anyone tells you there is only one way, their way, get as far away from them as possible, both physically and philosophically.

Rule #2: Don’t let the fuckers get ya. They can either help you, or not help you, but they can’t stop you. People who finance films, distribute films, promote films and exhibit films are not filmmakers. They are not interested in letting filmmakers define and dictate the way they do their business, so filmmakers should have no interest in allowing them to dictate the way a film is made. Carry a gun if necessary.

Also, avoid sycophants at all costs. There are always people around who only want to be involved in filmmaking to get rich, get famous, or get laid. Generally, they know as much about filmmaking as George W. Bush knows about hand-to-hand combat.

Rule #3: The production is there to serve the film. The film is not there to serve the production. Unfortunately, in the world of filmmaking this is almost universally backwards. The film is not being made to serve the budget, the schedule, or the resumes of those involved. Filmmakers who don’t understand this should be hung from their ankles and asked why the sky appears to be upside down.

Rule #4: Filmmaking is a collaborative process. You get the chance to work with others whose minds and ideas may be stronger than your own. Make sure they remain focused on their own function and not someone else’s job, or you’ll have a big mess. But treat all collaborators as equals and with respect. A production assistant who is holding back traffic so the crew can get a shot is no less important than the actors in the scene, the director of photography, the production designer or the director. Hierarchy is for those whose egos are inflated or out of control, or for people in the military. Those with whom you choose to collaborate, if you make good choices, can elevate the quality and content of your film to a much higher plane than any one mind could imagine on its own. If you don’t want to work with other people, go paint a painting or write a book. (And if you want to be a fucking dictator, I guess these days you just have to go into politics...).

Rule #5: Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.” MM