Guys on dates want to know: Is it really impossible to ignore an attractive...
Joe and Michelle are having dinner at a romantic restaurant. It’s their first anniversary, and everything is perfect — until an attractive woman walks past the table. Michelle notices that Joe casts a...
View ArticleSome insight into how the hollow-face illusion works
The hollow-face illusion is one of the most dramatic and robust illusions I’ve ever come across. It’s been known for well over 200 years, but it never ceases to amaze me, as this video demonstrates: A...
View ArticleSex and face recognition: Are male and female faces processed completely...
Take a look at these photos of Jim and Nora: They’ve clearly been distorted (using the “spherize” filter in Photoshop), but in opposite directions. Jim’s been “expanded” to make more spherical, while...
View ArticleAngry faces attract our attention when other faces do not
We’ve discussed attentional blink several times on CogDaily. It’s a fascinating phenomenon: if you see a series of images flashing by rapidly, you can normally pick out one of the images (for example,...
View ArticleAre older kids and adolescents really as good as adults at recognizing...
Take a look at this face: Does it look more angry or fearful? It may be rather difficult to tell: About fifty percent of adults say faces like this are angry and fifty percent say it’s fearful....
View ArticleAnime film characters: Do we perceive the intended race, or our own?
One of my favorite cartoons as a child was “Speed Racer.” It featured an all-American boy (first name, “Speed,” last name, “Racer”) engaging in that most American of pastimes: driving fast cars. Except...
View ArticleDetecting faces: People use some of the same strategies computers do
How does our visual system decide if something is a face? Some automated face-detecting software uses color as one cue that something is a face. For example Apple’s iPhoto has no trouble determining...
View ArticlePeople identify the sexual orientation of strangers as fast as 50 milliseconds
Nalini Ambady has become famous for her research on “thin slicing,” the idea that ordinary people can make accurate judgments about others amazingly quickly. We’ve discussed work from her lab showing...
View ArticleIs there an easier way to detect lies than what you see on TV?
The TV show Lie To Me focuses on the exploits of an expert in lie-detection as he solves perplexing crimes in his high-tech Washington laboratory. It’s actually fun to watch, especially since it...
View ArticleSynesthesia and the McGurk effect
We’ve discussed synesthesia many times before on Cognitive Daily — it’s the seemingly bizarre phenomenon when one stimulus (e.g. a sight or a sound) is experienced in multiple modalities (e.g. taste,...
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