Pareidolia : characterising facial anthropomorphism and its implications for product design

This work highlights the phenomenon of pareidolia – the tendency to see faces in the environment, buildings and objects that surround us – and establishes its r elevance for design contexts. In reviewing literature on anthropomorphism and the use of faces in design embodiment, we have shown that it is a compelling and prevalent facet of how we interpret products. By surveying 2,309 images from across the internet, we provide the first systematic investigation of product types and face characteristics (size, composition, emotion) that are manifest in this phenomenon. The most common instances were shown to be in medium-sized products, where part of the product was interpreted as a face, and that conveyed a happy emotion. The effects of culture and self-congruence are identified as important aspects of our interpretation of facial emotion . It is concluded that the fundamental geometric elements of products should be considered with respect to facial morphology, whether it be the intention to utilise its effects or not, and set out case for more quantified guidelines on the use of pareidolia and anthropomorphism in design

Lidské vnímání v situaci nejistoty: Vizuální, auditivní a vtělené reakce na nejednoznačné stimuly.

Naše smysly se vyvinuly tak, abychom z okolního prostředí získávat optimální množství informací. Tato optimalizace ovšem znamená, že je třeba počítat s chybami. Proto, abychom předešli těm s významným dopadem, vyvinula se u člověka tendence k nadhodnocování významu vzájemných souvislostí (i ve smyslu vnímání vzorů a posloupností). Ve své práci jsem testovala schopnost vyhodnocování vizuálních a akustických stimulů. Za použití počítačové grafiky byl vyvinut soubor testovacích stimulů, kde bylo rozložení prvků určeno sofistikovaným generátorem pseudo-náhodných čísel. Tyto výsledné masky s různou mírou průhlednosti byly užity k překrytí geometrických tvarů. Podobného postupu bylo užito k vytvoření černobílých stimulů s vysokým kontrastem. Za použití metod bayesovské statistiky jsem nalezla vzájemnou provázanost schopnosti určit přítomnost vzoru (a její absenci) a stylu myšlení, specificky racionálního a na intuici založeného. Dále jsem pak použila nejednoznačné výrazy tváře a vokalizace vysoce intenzivních afektivních stavů (bolest a slast) a stavů nízké intenzity (neutrální výraz/promluva, úsměv/smích). Výsledkem je zjištění, že vysoká intenzita projevu je spojena s nízkou schopností respondentů správně vyhodnotit valenci vizuálních i akustických stimulů. Díky použitému statistickému přístupu jsem...In order to orient ourselves in the environment our senses have evolved so as to acquire optimal information. The optimization, however, incurs mistakes. To avoid costly ones, the over-perception of patterns (in humans) augments the decision making. I tested the decision- making in two modalities, acoustic and visual. A set of stimuli (using computer-generated graphics, based on output from a very good pseudo random generator) was produced: masks with a random pattern with varying degree of transparency over geometrical figures were used, followed by similar task that involved black and white high-contrast patterns. In both cases, I was able to find, using a Bayesian statistical approach, that the ability to detect the correct pattern presence (or lack thereof) was related to respondents' thinking styles, specifically Rationality and Intuition. Furthermore, I used ambiguous facial expressions, and accompanying vocalizations, of high-intensity affects (pain, pleasure and fear) and low- intensity (neutral and smile/laughter). My findings evidenced that the high-intensity facial expressions and vocalizations were rated with a low probability of correct response. Differences in the consistency of the ratings were detected and also the range of probabilities of being due to chance (guessing). When...Katedra filosofie a dějin přírodních vědDepartment of Philosophy and History of SciencePřírodovědecká fakultaFaculty of Scienc

Face pareidolia in products : the effect of emotional content on attentional capture, eagerness to explore, and likelihood to purchase

Face‐like configurations can be perceived in everyday products. This perceptual phenomenon is known as face pareidolia. However, few studies have investigated the perception of pareidolic emotion in such products and the effect it could have on consumer behaviour. Therefore, in this study, across two experiments, we test the extent to which participants perceive core human emotions in products with pareidolic configurations (Experiment 1), and how this affects key consumer metrics (i.e., likely attentional capture, eagerness to explore, likelihood to purchase; Experiment 2). The findings show that these products do elicit the full range of affective content, with variation in perceived emotional intensity. Products with ‘happy’, ‘angry’ and ‘surprise’ configurations were likely to capture attention/promote product exploration, but only ‘happy’ products retained this advantage for purchasing decisions. Individual differences in mood and level of loneliness predicted likely engagement with these products. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed

Facial expression based emotion detection-A Review

Emotion detection is the task of recognizing a person’s emotion state. Understanding facial expression accurately is one of the challenging task for interpersonal relationship. Automatic emotion detection using facial expressions recognition is now a main area of interest within various fields such as computer vision, medicine and psychology. Various feature extraction techniques have been developed for recognition of expression from static images as well as real time videos. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based detection for emotion like anger, confusion, happy, sad, annoyed, stressed etc. is now a days, gathering more popularity among the researchers as it provides better results. Human emotion can be detected image through digital processing. Few work done on emotion detection, those are published recently reviewed are summarizes here briefly.Keywords—Emotion, interpersonal, facial expression, ANN, Recognition, extraction, digital processin

Social and Affective Neuroscience of Everyday Human Interaction

This Open Access book presents the current state of the art knowledge on social and affective neuroscience based on empirical findings. This volume is divided into several sections first guiding the reader through important theoretical topics within affective neuroscience, social neuroscience and moral emotions, and clinical neuroscience. Each chapter addresses everyday social interactions and various aspects of social interactions from a different angle taking the reader on a diverse journey. The last section of the book is of methodological nature. Basic information is presented for the reader to learn about common methodologies used in neuroscience alongside advanced input to deepen the understanding and usability of these methods in social and affective neuroscience for more experienced readers

Sense-making and Intensification of Affect in the Production and Apprehension of Sound. The Idea of Exo-brain

In this paper I examine the process of getting affected by and the process of making sense of non-language sounds and propose the idea of the contextual cognitive apparatus or exo-brain. We are affected by a singing voice even when we do not fully understand the sounds produced by it. When the listener starts hearing words in the sung song and/or starts interpreting the heard words he recreates the sense and meaning of the song based on a context which either preexists in a culture or gets formed due to his extended engagement with a nebulous auditory stimulus that is perceived as meaningful. This is what I call the work of the creative ear. The affective power of the song comes from an affective reaction between the singing voice, especially the sung non-language sounds, and the linguistic and cultural contexts of the singer and the listener and out this affective reaction something emerges which constitutes the meaning, sensible or affective, of the non-language sound. I show how the cognitive contexts of the production and the reception of the non-language sounds, and the song, play a central role in our apprehension of the sounds and propose the existence of an extra-bodily sense making organ of our cognitive system, the extension of our brain and sense organs, which I call contextual cognitive apparatus or exo-brain

Multi-Domain Norm-referenced Encoding Enables Data Efficient Transfer Learning of Facial Expression Recognition

People can innately recognize human facial expressions in unnatural forms, such as when depicted on the unusual faces drawn in cartoons or when applied to an animal's features. However, current machine learning algorithms struggle with out-of-domain transfer in facial expression recognition (FER). We propose a biologically-inspired mechanism for such transfer learning, which is based on norm-referenced encoding, where patterns are encoded in terms of difference vectors relative to a domain-specific reference vector. By incorporating domain-specific reference frames, we demonstrate high data efficiency in transfer learning across multiple domains. Our proposed architecture provides an explanation for how the human brain might innately recognize facial expressions on varying head shapes (humans, monkeys, and cartoon avatars) without extensive training. Norm-referenced encoding also allows the intensity of the expression to be read out directly from neural unit activity, similar to face-selective neurons in the brain. Our model achieves a classification accuracy of 92.15\% on the FERG dataset with extreme data efficiency. We train our proposed mechanism with only 12 images, including a single image of each class (facial expression) and one image per domain (avatar). In comparison, the authors of the FERG dataset achieved a classification accuracy of 89.02\% with their FaceExpr model, which was trained on 43,000 images

Social and Affective Neuroscience of Everyday Human Interaction

This Open Access book presents the current state of the art knowledge on social and affective neuroscience based on empirical findings. This volume is divided into several sections first guiding the reader through important theoretical topics within affective neuroscience, social neuroscience and moral emotions, and clinical neuroscience. Each chapter addresses everyday social interactions and various aspects of social interactions from a different angle taking the reader on a diverse journey. The last section of the book is of methodological nature. Basic information is presented for the reader to learn about common methodologies used in neuroscience alongside advanced input to deepen the understanding and usability of these methods in social and affective neuroscience for more experienced readers