Stereotypes

It always amazes me when I take the tube or the bus and when observing people, see how diverse human face and body pattern can be. I love to see the stream of that diversity flooding in and out with every stop, and I sometimes play a game of mixing up people - putting hair-styles of the punk on the old man, or a floral dress on the business executive. I also imagine people with different eye-colour or face structure, using my imagination to reconstruct someones visual appearance. The image you see here is a web version of just such a game. Of course, as a visual neuroscientist, I know how exquisitely sensitive our face perception is. We are also very fast at telling racial face differences. This link is interesting because it plays on such neural mechanisms to create very striking facial montages (although the original portraits are also striking, doubling the effect).

Posted by Ian at October 24, 2002 09:58 PM | TrackBack §