Your Eyes Make Your Face Come Alive

Consider this: A doll with human-like features still doesn't look as real as a live person - do you know why? A new study claims it's all in the eyes.

Researchers have found that a face has to be quite similar to a human face in order to appear alive, and that the cues are mainly in the eyes.

Eyes Choose a Mate
Males and females of cichlid fishes exhibit differences in seeing things, especially in choosing their mate.

"There's something fundamentally important about seeing a face and knowing that the lights are on and someone is home," said Thalia Wheatley of Dartmouth College.

Wheatley and graduate student Christine Looser drove around New Hampshire visiting toy stores and taking pictures of dolls' faces.

They then paired each doll face with a similar-looking human face and used morphing software to blend the two, to make a whole set of intermediate pictures that were part human, part doll.

People Behave Better When There Are 'Eyes on You'
It's true that we are better behaved when someone is watching us, but a new research has stated even if we are surrounded by images of eyes, and not real people, we tend to behave nicely.

Looser and Wheatley found that the tipping point, where people determined the faces to be alive, was about two-thirds of the way along the continuum, closer to the human side than to the doll side.

Another experiment found that the eyes were the most important feature for determining life.

Heart Disease Linked to Pollution, Reveal Eyes
Exposure to air pollution results in a higher risk of heart disease, researchers claim, who photographed tiny blood vessels in a person's eyes as evidence.

The results show that objects with faces may look human, but telling the difference lets us reserve our social energies for faces that are capable of thinking, feeling, and interacting with us.

"I think we all seek connections with others. When we recognize life in a face, Wheatley said, we think, "This is a mind I can connect with."

Cheap Reading Glasses Harm Eyes
People looking to cut down the costs by opting for cheap reading glasses could be doing more harm to their eyes

The study is published in Psychological Science.

Source-ANI