The Uncanny Valley And Visual Expertise

Facial recognition is a technological product of the digital age that is continuing to evolve. The efficiency of the technology is an asset to crime detectives apprehending criminals, or the government tracking suspected terrorists for the safety of the country. It can also be used on a corporate level to allow a business to understand their ideal customer, or to increase the intractability of their website. While these abilities are positives to the people using them, the data collection may be harming more than it is helping. Considering the benefits of facial recognition, it is important for people to see what they are giving up for a more efficient experience. Facial recognition technology forces users to relinquish control of their own

When a person experiences chills or goose bumps as a reaction to something strange or unusual, they are being affected by a sense of uncanniness. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud endeavored to explain this feeling of uncanniness in his essay entitled “The Uncanny”. Freud’s theory focuses around two different causes for this reaction. Freud attributes the feeling of uncanniness to repressed infantile complexes that have been revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs that have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed. The first point of his theory that Freud discusses in the essay is the repression of infantile complexes that cause an uncanny experience.

Sigmund Freud coined this term when trying to explain something strangely familiar yet unfamiliar. It speaks to seeing or experiencing new but also takes us back to our own psychological past or something within the material world. It is suddenly recognizing something that seems unfamiliar and in fact, has an identity

This double dissociation therefore suggests that recognition of faces and common objects is served by different mechanisms that are independent for each other. Although brain cells of face recognition have not been located, some functional models could help us interpret face recognition and prosopagnosia. One of the most influential models was proposed by Bruce and Young (1986). In this model face recognition involves several steps, and three steps more relate to prosopagnosia.

Everyday people stare at billboards, magazine covers, movies, television, or pictures on the Internet of someone or something that they classify as beautiful. Some things people glance over and other things fascinate them. For example, when Farrah Fawcett’s famous picture of her in her red bathing suit came out; many teenage boys hung that picture in their bedrooms. Their idea of Farrah’s beauty was based strictly her outward appearance.

Imagine lacking the ability to recognize the familiar face of a loved one or spouse. Or having to rely on voices, clothing, and certain attributes of that individual in order to have some kind of knowledge on who they actually are. This condition is defined as Prosopagnosia; known as face blindness or facial agnostic. According to Barton (2008), it was first described as a consequence of cerebral damage by Quaking and Bordello in 1867. This term comes from the Greek word “face” and “lack of knowledge.” Stated by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (2007), Prosopagnosia is anticipated to be the result of damages, abnormalities, or destruction in the right fusiform gyrus; part of the brain that controls the perception of faces and the functionality of memory in the neural system. This deficit can be present from birth, the result of a stroke, a traumatic brain injury, or neurodegenerative diseases. In order to help an individual with Prosopagnosia, it is essential to develop compensatory or redeeming strategies, as well as the use of clues or attributes to help them better identify individuals.

The authors of this paper are interested in the psychological basis of the behavioural avoidance of people with facial disfigurement. Specifically, they are interested in how people respond to individuals with facial birth marks.

This article argues that the physical appearance not only matters, it is important to our everyday life. It states that we uses some of the physical characteristics, especially facial appearance, to identify certain types of people. It is a survival skill in the case of recognizing criminals ,children, and peers. This is a scholarly research on facial appearance. I can use this to a one of the major point to support my thesis.

It was hypothesized that interpretation of an ambiguous stimuli that can be perceived as either a rat or a human face will be influenced by the context under which they view the figure and their past experience with other figures. That is they will be influenced by their perceptual set.

Overly, the model provides coherent explanation of many kind of information about faces and how they relate to each other. It provides evidence about significant differences in processing of familiar and unfamiliar faces. Nonetheless there are limitations. For instance, there is not enough information about processing unfamiliar faces. Burton et al. (1999)

Prosopagnosia is defined as the difficulty in recognizing an individuals face; it is broken down into 3 main types; Apperceptive prosopagnosia, associative prosopagnosia and developmental prosopagnosia. Perception is an important aspect when recognizing faces, without recognizing the stimulus (face) you would not be able to identify a person. Therefore the individuals who sufferer from this disorder is unable to accurately recognize a face whether that be the face of a familiar person such as a family member or close friend, the face of a famous person, or even their own face. This paper will look at prosopagnosia in greater detail, it will explain the 3 main types, as well as give insight as to why face recognition is important in our

The present study examined how achievement goals (mastery approach goals and performance approach goals) influence false recognition. Participants were fifty-eight Japanese university students (31 female, 27 male; mean age of 18.56, SD = 0.53) who received different goal instructions depending on the goal condition. Participants were randomly assigned to either the mastery or performance approach goals condition. We applied the DRM paradigm to examine the probability of false recognition. Results showed that the mastery approach goals condition had a higher rate of false recognition than the performance approach goals condition (mastery approach goals condition M = 0.60, SD = 0.22; performance approach goals condition M = 0.43, SD = 0.22; t(57)

Literature on the topic of attractiveness is very extensive. The human face is something that catches every ones attention and more over the scientists as well the psychologists are interested in analyzing the ability of humans to extract information of the others. Several factors and features are associated with attractiveness. Some examples include facial symmetry, skin color, facial traits, clear skin and health of facial skin. It is hypothesized that facial symmetry is an important factors in measuring physical attractiveness. Different features may be perceived as attractive by different people.

Sigmund Freud’s says that the uncanny “undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible- to all that arouses dread and creeping horror, it is equally certain, too, that the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread.”(Freud), he also says that what makes something specifically uncanny is that it is opposite of what is familiar. . Certain components of the short stories “The Lottery”, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, and “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, highlight Freud’s definition of the uncanny. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Freud’s definition of the uncanny appears continuously throughout the story, especially when the woman believes that she is the figure lurking behind the wallpaper. Also, in the short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, Freud’s definition of the uncanny occurs within the mysterious plot and how the end revealed that the “winner” of the lottery had to be beaten to death with citizens of the city throwing stones at them. Lastly, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is connected to Freud’s definition of the uncanny since the story gives the reader a false sense of security, which makes the reader feel the horror and unfamiliarity that it brings

Bruce and Young’s theory of recognition tells us that human’s extract several kinds of information from faces; and that there are eight different components of such information. Such as structural encoding, expression analysis, facial speech analysis, directed visual processing, face recognition nodes,