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September 18, 2005
Visual Illusion
My Visual Illusion: http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/mona/mona.html
This visual illusion interests me because it relates to a project that I did last year in my psychology class. The project assignment was to investigate some aspect of memory. I chose to research and explore facial recognition, or what it is that makes humans able to recognize someone again and again despite different environments, hairstyles, clothing, attitudes, and more. What I found was that our temporal lobe is responsible for facial recognition. Some of the neurons located in the temporal lobe are able to recognize certain facial features. Thus, even when a face is altered, the temporal lobe can still recognize finite features on the face. People whose temporal lobe has been damaged may not necessarily be able to identify the face that they are seeing. This condition is called prosopagnosia. (This word originates from the Greek word prospon meaning face, and the Greek word agnosis meaning without knowledge.) Usually, prosopagnosics can tell they’re looking at a face and can identify separate facial features, eyes, nose, and mouth, but they do not know whose face they are seeing. These people cannot recognize celebrities, family members, or even their own face in a mirror. Instead, they must identify people by context, clothing, body build, and tone of voice.
More interesting research that I discovered on facial recognition was facial fragmentation studies that have been conducted. During facial fragmentation studies, subjects attempt to identify individuals in isolated photographs, such as a photo of only one’s nose. These studies revealed that we tend to identify people by their eyes first, then by their mouth and nose. When asked to describe the face of a person, the most distinguishing characteristic was hair. Eyes, nose, and eyebrows closely followed hair.
Thus, I was really interested in this visual illusion. The reason that I think that we do not immediately recognize the problem with the picture on the right is because our brain is so quick to identify the photo as the Mona Lisa that it does not focus on the fact that something is wrong with her face.
P.S. Sorry to go into sooooo much detail, I just find this so interesting. If you find it interesting as well, here is another website that I used for my project last year which explores some aspects of facial recognition.
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/java/faces.html
Posted by lciscotis at September 18, 2005 09:00 PM
Comments
This is my favorite one yet because I have never seen anthing like it. Any art illusion is of definite interest to me! Although I did notice that there was a difference in the mouths of the Mona Lisas, I had no idea that there was such a drastic difference between the two!
Posted by: Ariel at September 19, 2005 08:29 PM