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The Tipping Point of Humanness
sciencehabit writes "Robert Zemeckis, take note. Using videos that morph the face of a baby or man into a doll, researchers have figured out at what point we stop considering a face human — and start considering it artificial. The ability, the researchers say, is key to our survival, enabling us to quickly determine whether the eyes we're looking at have a mind behind them. It may also explain why so many people hated The Polar Express."
"It may also explain why so many people hated The Polar Express."
It may also explain why so many people loved the LOTR trilogy (Gollum).
Yo mamma's so fat, the recursive function calculating her mass density had a stack overflow.
Time. Consider our everyday conversations: "Ooh, he's creepy. He keeps looking at my stomach." "Look me in the eye and tell me that." "Watch that customer in the Jewelry department--he's got shifty eyes."
Examining static images of faces has limited (some, but limited) value. When we look at eyes, don't we immediately calculate *what they're looking at*? Much of our assessment of the character and intentions of people and animals seems to be based on how the eyes move.
For me, it was his mouth that seemed way off. Somehow, the motion of the lips moving either seems to be off-sync with the sound, or exaggeratedly tight-lipped.
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There's a brain disorder that causes people to be unable to recognize human faces. I wonder if the uncanny valley effect works on them, because clearly they are missing that survival function that you noted.
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because it wasn't that great of a film. The 3D wasn't terrible, but most folks I know really didn't care for the story.
"Hey, I know what we're gonna do today." -- Phineas Flynn
No reason to hate the puppets. But this does give some indication as to why Nancy Pelosi makes so many people uneasy...
Although the movie wasn't a tour de force, I thought the "creepiness" of Clu's facial expressions was actually a plus, because he was supposed to be creepy, he's the bad guy! The theme was the attempt by Flynn at perfection, and you can see that perfection isn't perfect in Clu's face. However, it probably would have been a better idea to use makeup and a little digital retouching in the initial scenes for young Flynn. Obviously Tron: Legacy was trying to show what current technology could do compared to old technology, but outside the grid, use the real world technology to show real life rather than CGI, it would have been better.
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My cats look directly and intently at my face every day, and it's obvious from the circumstances that they recognize that a mind with intent is attached to those eyes and they're eager to figure out what that intent might be (and whether it might adversely affect them). This is not at all a behavior exclusive to primates, much less humans. Presumably that means my cats would have hated The Polar Express, too. They're already annoyed by Tom Hanks' nasally voice.
The study has nothing to do with the point you are making. There is no real world situation where we encounter Polar Express level-of-competence simulacra and our life is threatened if we make an incorrect decision. Claiming "survival," let alone it being "key" to survival, is sloppy thinking by researchers who have apparently internalized some evolutionary pyschology memes.
This ability is presumably a side effect of other valuable mental skills, such as the ability to read facial expression and identify similar looking faces. Which is amazing and the subject of not much study, but no what this article is about and not what the experiment measured.
Scott McCloud has a fairly good chapter on this in his book, Understanding Comics. He demonstrates drawing-space as a three-variabled continuum, a triangle. It's been a while, but I think the points were something like complexity, abstractness, realism. But the crux of the matter was, the simpler the approximation, the more we could associate ourselves in that role, so it became more emotionally immersive. Dory and Nemo's dad were very simplified, abstractified, so we related better.
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The concept of the uncanny valley is a well known one: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UncannyValley
Or as Shakespeare put it, "There's no art/To find the mind's construction in the face." That quote leaped to mind when I read your post.
It's called prosopagnosia. And yes, the uncanny valley works on them. They can see if something is human or not.
What they can't do is decide who the face they see belongs to. Al least not without detailed study of said face.
"Hmm, I see blue eyes with large lashes. A nose with some large pores. The chin is somewhat pointy. I'm guessing this is Jennifer. Oh wait, she wears the same shoes that Jennifer wore three months ago. Yes, I think it might very well be her."
Not exaggerated either.
Yeah, I guess it'd be pretty important if the zombie uprising ever happens, or the world is taken over by sentient dolls.
You may not be able to do it 100%, but are you sure you can't do better than random?
Exactly. We don't have any problem seeing emotional life-likeness in even very schematic comic characters, plush animals, and occasionally even objects that don't have a face at all. I'm willing to bet if tomorrow very strange aliens descended from the sky, having totally un-earthlike features, we would still connect with them emotionally without a problem, because we can learn to interpret non-human reactions and features. Yet somehow human characters that are "not quite right" irritate us.
Since even clearly perceived falseness doesn't trip us up at all when interacting with non-human characters, I hypothesize that the uncanny valley could actually be caused by a visual subsystem that deals with recognizing sickness and death in humans, triggering an involuntary repulsion that then is rationalized after the brain realizes it has this reaction mainly when looking at dolls. People do appear to have associations with death as they jokingly described the Polar Express as something reminiscent of a zombie movie. This is probably also the reason why zombie movies (where the undead don't look like live people with excessive makeup) are so effective. That legless zombie girl in "The Walking Dead" pilot creeped me out to no end...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia in case anyone is interested.
"Prosopagnosia (sometimes known as face blindness) is a disorder of face perception where the ability to recognize faces is impaired, while the ability to recognize other objects may be relatively intact. The term originally referred to a condition following acute brain damage, but recently a congenital form of the disorder has been proposed, which may be inherited by about 2.5% of the population. The specific brain area usually associated with prosopagnosia is the fusiform gyrus.
Few successful therapies have so far been developed for affected people, although individuals often learn to use 'piecemeal' or 'feature by feature' recognition strategies. This may involve secondary clues such as clothing, hair color, body shape, and voice. Because the face seems to function as an important identifying feature in memory, it can also be difficult for people with this condition to keep track of information about people, and socialize normally with others."
There is no real world situation where we encounter Polar Express level-of-competence simulacra and our life is threatened if we make an incorrect decision
Today, yes.
In evolutionary past... there are lots of illnesses that cause people's minds to degrade (animal minds, too). The most common one that comes to mind is rabies, which also makes people and animals move in a somewhat zombielike, jerky fashion.
In the modern world, identifying a rabid animal isn't quite as needed, since vaccinations have helped to slow the spread of the disease via "herd immunity" even to the "wild", feral animals that live in many cities and urban areas. Go back a century or more, on the other hand, and identifying it early - in livestock, working dogs, and wild animals - was a much more necessary skill. Hell, identifying an infected food animal is important so as not to eat it.
And then there's African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), leprosy, Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob, transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (aka "kuru", "laughing sickness"), and other "prion" diseases.
I'm autistic. I don't seem to have the automatic distinction between things with minds and things without minds. In fact, I can occasionally forget that other people have minds, briefly. For instance, a couple of days ago, I was pinching Beloved Spouse's cheeks, and I suddenly got fascinated with how the various components of the face are connected and deform each other. I started messing with this. Suddenly it occurred to me: There is a person experiencing this, and it may not be a preferred experience. But there you have it; for a good four or five seconds, I had completely forgotten that my spouse was a sapient creature. While staring directly at said spouse's face.
I can't think of an occasion on which this has been any kind of survival problem. (My spouse is very forgiving.)
I suspect that it's useful to get this stuff automatically, but it also produces all sorts of strange buggy behavior when we find things that trigger the "that's people" grey matter but which aren't actually people.
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There's simple artistic concerns as well beyond the math. Zemeckis and others need to sit down and understand why Pixar's hand crafted, "super deformed" characters come across as orders of magnitude more realistic than high tech attempts to directly dump humans into the computer. I've always felt if you want realistic humans just use actors, and CGI everything else.
LotR is based on a seminal work of fantasy literature for all ages, read by generations of readers over the decades. So it is fair to say that it already had an established fan-base.
It also featured a whole lot of "real people" actors, most of them of a rather high caliber.
Polar Express is based on a 1980's children's book, based around a character created by Coca Cola's marketing division.
A character that has since then grown into a symbol of consumerism like no other.
Oh, and the animation sucked.
Also, one features a HUGE universe and loads of heroic battles and quests, while the other features... well... public transportation.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
My cats look directly and intently at my face every day
Maybe your cats are just waiting for you to pass on so they can eat you? Actually, I do wonder what they are thinking at such times... maybe something as simple as love.
Of course, nobody can assess a sociopath''s character except a trained psychologist administering a test for the disorder.
Not necessarily so. The desire for political office, or any authority for that matter, is a pretty sure sign.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
that the cut-off is at the 67%/33% mark ? After all, one end of the scale is fixed, a picture of a real human, but the other end is not fixed, should they have drawn the line at 99%human/1% lego brick ?
Nullius in verba
They are attempting to calculate the best approach to getting fresh food in their bowl based on your mood and their own. Do they howl until you give in? A little mewl and a flick of the tail? A pur and flop next to the bowl so that you notice it is empty while giving a belly rub? That little head butt thing that says "you one of my people and thats cool with me"? Do they sit on your dinner plate? Do they walk up to a glass of grape juice, look you in the eye and then knock it onto the carpet?
I think he is alluding to the 1930s Coca-Cola marketing campaign in which the first depiction of Santa Clause as we know him now--the fat, jolly fellow with a white beard and a red and white suit (which incidentally were the colors of the Coca-Cola logo)--was introduced.
Depictions of Santa Clause prior to this varied in the colors and girth of the mythical person.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Well, it was a bit of a Tongue-in-cheek description of Santa Claus, based on a urban not-completely-legend that he was created by Coca Cola in order to sell more Coke during winter.
Actually, he was more like "appropriated" for that purpose.
As for the "symbol of consumerism" - sadly, I can't say that I was joking there.
Cause, he is either selling soda-pop, or promoting shopping.
And even at his pre-Coca Cola moral best, he was still a symbol of material rewarding for "being good".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The Polar Express seemed to have "rubbery" motion capture. I used to see this problem at trade shows like SIGGRAPH. The electromagnetic motion capture people would have a stage with a live dancer wearing sensors at her joints, and screens showing the CG character driven from the dancer. The CG character always moved worse than the live dancer. If the dancer did a hard stop, the CG character would show much less abrupt deceleration. That's because the electromagnetic systems were noisy, and had to be low-pass filtered.
There were also alignment problems. The hand positions were usually off. Metal in the area would distort the fields slightly. Around 2000 or so, errors of several inches were still common. I asked one of the demo dancers to touch her fingertips together, and the CG character was off by the breadth of a hand. The Polar Express animation had a similar slightly-off look.
This got better once motion capture started using multiple cameras at much higher frame rates than the animation. There's still some noise and filtering is still needed, but the noise is up at a few hundred Hz and the filters have higher cutoff frequencies. By the time the motion is downconverted to 24FPS, the effects of the filtering have disappeared.
The severity of my facial blindness is still to be studied in a laboratory environment, but I's around where I sometimes cannot follow the plot in a movie since two main characters might look "the same" to me just because the cues I normally use, facial hair, hair style, movement etc are too similar in some of the scenes.
With that said, I'd happily go along with "67%" in the videos from the article, and thus there doesn't seem to be a difference at least for me.
it's in my head
The image of Santa as a plump man was popularized by "A Visit From St. Nicholas ('Twas the Night Before Christmas)" in 1823:
He had a broad face, and a little round belly
That shook when he laugh'd, like a bowl full of jelly:
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laugh'd when I saw him in spite of myself;
And the modern icon is generally credited to Thomas Nast, circa 1880, upon which Haddon Sundblom based his Coca-Cola ads a full 50 years later. At most, Sundblom popularized the red suit, but he was quite an artist in his own right, so calling it a "character created by Coca Cola's marketing division" is both giving their "marketing department" too much credit, as well as doing a disservice to Sundblom. It's more accurate to say that Coca-Cola's advertising used to consist of actual art.
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I just saw a Nova special about this exact topic called Dogs Decoded. He wasn't one of the researchers listed but I'm sure there are many out there. It's on instant watch if you are Netflix customer
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
No. It's simply wrong and probably a messing up with another character which indeed was created by a marketing campaign.
I can show you Santa Claus pictures going back at least to 1822 showing a white bearded, red clothed Santa Claus (the german "Struwwelpeter" for instance has one).
Santa Claus (Saint Nicholas) was bishop in Myra, a small town in today's southern Turkey. As a bishop, he is wearing a red gown on all depictions of him - showing him with the red ornate of every catholic bishop. In the european catholic countries Santa Claus is still wearing a bishop hat (a mitre), but everything else is very similar to the US version.
And an editorial piece of the New York Times from 1932, several years before the marketing campaign from Coca Cola, already complains about exactly that standardized Santa Claus picture the urban myth attributes to Coca Cola.
No, Coca Cola has nothing to do with the creation of Santa Claus or any of his modern image. It just took the iconography that was already there for a marketing campaign.
But one Christmas character indeed comes from a marketing campaign of that time: It's Rudolph the Rednoosed Reindeer.
the Cambridge Face Memory Test was an eyeopener for me.
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The point GP is making is that many of those diseases cause people or animals to act/move/look slightly "off", and noticing that was key to avoiding them and avoiding infection. The rabid person doesn't look normal. It's not so much a physical thing, it's a behavior thing which still plays into "appearance". It's perfectly natural that a revulsion reaction would be an evolutionary defense for this.
Likewise computer animations are often slightly "off" in the same way - the muscle groups may not work together like they should, or reactions may not be what we expect, or slower than usual.
I can tell you from personal experience that the Uncanny Valley effect works just fine. It's not so much an "inability to recognize human faces" as an inability to distinguish between faces, especially similar-looking faces. For example, I have no trouble telling that Barack Obama is not the same person as Bill Clinton, but telling Bush, Sr. from Bush, Jr. is nearly impossible.
It's part of why I prefer anime, comics, and other drawn entertainment over live-action: the reduced detail of the medium makes it hard to draw large numbers of distinctive faces, so the artists tend to load up on secondary identification cues such as hairstyle or preferred clothing -- things that are easy for me to identify.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Saint Nicholas has absolutely nothing to do with Santa Claus, at least in my original country. The day for him (IIRC now) is on the 6th of December, where you get some chocolates, peanuts, etc. Actually my grandfather my a Saint Nicolas figure, for just that (you could open it and put something inside). I learned in school, that he gave half his red cape to a poor beggar, and that's why he is important.
The christmas presents are brought by the "Christkindl", which is a blond haired woman. When I was a kid I had no idea what Santa Claus is. Only much much later I learned of "Santa Claus", but is still just an american thing for me.
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