What is it about?
In this paper, a curious illusion is introduced: a schematic image of a face which can be perceived as having a merry expression or a worrying expression. Which version of emotion is perceived depends on whether the facial element below nose is interpreted as a mouth or as a moustache.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Among the multitude of ambiguous images it is a rare example of ambiguity and multistability of perception of expressed emotion.
Perspectives
The ambiguous image introduced in this paper can be used as a stimulus in emotion perception research where it is advisable to remove the confounding change in visual stimulus features. If subjective perception of emotion expressed by this visually invariant face alternates between different interpretations and if at the same time brain responses would be recorded, we would be able to extract objective neural signatures of "pure" emotion perception. The change in brain responses between alternative variants of perceived emotion would not be confounded by changes in the processes of early level visual feature processing.
Professor Talis Bachmann
Tartu Ulikool
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Merry-or-Worry, Illusion, Perception, March 2022, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/03010066221086080.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
