Illusion of face 9

Illusion of Face 9

since December 7, 2011

"Mona Lisa eye-direction asymmetry effect"

The right mirror-reversed Mona Lisa appears to gaze leftward more largely than the original does rightward.

Kitaoka, A. (2012). Asymmetry of perception of right vs. left eye directions. Talk in the Summer Meeting of the Vision Society of Japan, Yamagata University, Yonezawa, Japan, on August 7, 2012.

"The fat face thin (fft) illusion: Tokura version"

The left face appears to be fat, but its inverted one shown in the right does not appear to be fat so much.

This image was drawn by Ms Hisayo Tokura for her graduation thesis and has been exhibited with her permission.

"Underestimation of the higher eyelid line" or "Overestimation of the lower eyelid line"

In the left image, the upper eyelid line appears to be thinner than the upper one, though they are the same thickness. This effect is weak in the inverted face, as shown in the right. The thickness of eyebrows does not seem to affect this illusion.

"An illustration of the Thatcher illusion 2012, corrected"

The left image shows an upside-down image of an illustration of a smiling lady. The right image is different from the left one, in which each of eyes and the mouth is inverted in the inverted face. Observers do not feel it bizarre so much, while it appears to be rather bizarre when the image is inverted and the face is upright (see below). This effect is called the Thatcher illusion.Smiling eyes are effective.

"An illustration of the Thatcher illusion 2012"

"Wollaston illusion: version 2012"

The left face appears to gaze at the observer while the right one appears to see leftward (for her), though the eyes are identical between them. This phenomenon was proposed by Wollaston (1824).

William Hyde Wollaston

Wollaston, W. H. (1824) On the apparent direction of eye in a portrait. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B114, 247-256. (I do not have the copy, so I have not confirmed this paper yet)

Langton, S. R. H., Watt, R. J., and Bruce, V.: Do the eyes have it? Cues to the direction of social attention. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 50-59, 2000.
Langton, S. R. H., Honeyman, H., and Tessler, E.: The influence of head contour and nose angle on the perception of eye gaze direction. Perception & Psychophysics, 66, 752–771, 2004
Todorović, D.: Geometrical basis of perception of gaze direction. Vision Research, 46, 3549-3562, 2006
Nakato, E., Otsuka, Y., Konuma, H., Kanazawa, S., Yamaguchi, M. K., and Tomonaga, M.: Perception of illusory shift of gaze direction by infants. Infant Behavior and Development, 32, 422-428, 2009

"Wobbling Face and Sex illusion"

The face appears to wobble as well as the apparent sex is ambiguous and flips to the other.

Uploaded with permission of Dr. Sayako Ueda

"Wobbling Pupil illusion"

When pupils are duplicated in an eye contour vertically, the wobbling effect is observed. When pupils are duplicated in an eye contour horizontally, the wobbling effect is weak.

I have come across the paper of Shocking illusion - Pretty girls turn ugly! <December 21, 2011>

Tangen J M, Murphy S C, Thompson M B, 2011, "Flashed face distortion effect: Grotesque faces from relative spaces" Perception 40(5) 628 – 630

http://www.perceptionweb.com/abstract.cgi?id=p6968

"Eye interval illusion"

The interval of both eyes in the left face appears to be shorter than that of the right faces, though they are the same distance.

I have discovered this illusion in an image drawn by Professor Mitsuo Endo, University of the Ryukyus, Japan.

Professor Endo's image

Akiyoshi's illusion pages