Weird Optical Illusion Turns Movie Stars into Monsters

It's a pretty neat illusion. It seems to me a lot of the resulting faces look like a certain style of cartoon.

Researchers Jason M Tangen, Sean C Murphy and Matthew B Thompson published their results in the on-line journal Perceptions.

An extract of the paper said: 'The degree of distortion is greatest for faces that deviate from the others in the set on a particular dimension (eg if a person has a large forehead, it looks particularly large).'

The strange effect is 'summoned' by watching a cross in between two panels of 'flashing' human faces. The viewer looks at a cross hair in the centre of the screen as the video cycles through two sets faces - which are all aligned at eye height. The viewer looks at a cross hair in the centre of the screen as the video cycles through two sets faces - which are all aligned at eye height

The researchers are yet to explain what causes the effect after it was accidentally discovered by Mr Murphy.

In a blog his colleague Mr Thompson said the effect may 'have something to do with relative encoding. He wrote: 'That is, forcing people to encode each face in light of the others. 'By eye-aligning the faces, it becomes much easier to compare their shape and the relative location of their features, so the differences between them become more evident.'

 Brains are just weird.  Spotted at Althouse.