Good with faces

[imomus]

Reading newspaper reports of crimes, I'm constantly amazed at the ability of witnesses to recall the faces and clothes of suspects, make police robo-portraits, and pick out culprits in identity parades. Of course, sometimes DNA testing or circumstantial evidence later reveals this kind of certainty as misplaced. But I must say it's rather enviable.



I wish I were better with faces. It's a totally normal thing for me to be approached by a stranger saying "Hello, we met at such-and-such, perhaps you don't remember me..." And they're absolutely right, I don't. I think one reason for this is that I'm rather introverted and don't make much eye contact. So even though I might be with someone for ten minutes, that might only include a few seconds of looking directly at them, and those few seconds are difficult to access a year later. I certainly don't make conscious mental notes like "Has alert, greeny-blue eyes, sparse eyebrows, brown hair, wide-spread lips finely-pointed at the ends, square jaw..." I'm also rather in despair of novels which provide such descriptions, because putting together a face in your mind from verbal descriptions is one of the most futile activities known to man, and a great demonstration of the limits of language.



But over the last couple of days I've got rather more confident in my ability to "recall" faces thanks to a Java applet called FaceMachine. Developed by Tom Busey at Indiana University, FaceMachine uses "Eigenfaces", collections of features that tend to occur together in faces. New faces are created by adding and subtracting Eigenfaces from the Average Face. (You can download a version which allows you to save the faces you create here.)



The fascinating thing -- as you slide FaceMachine's 15 sliders back and forth, trying to get the face to look like someone specific -- is that you aren't using observation, or working on specific facial details as you would when drawing someone from life. It's much more intuitive. I found myself simply asking "Does this look more or less like X?" as I moved the sliders around. Tiny incremental decisions like that, not based even on a specific mental image of what X does look like, ended up yielding some very accurate representations. See if you can guess who the images I came up with are supposed to be.



Some faces were more difficult than others. My own, for instance, was tricky. David Bowie's was suspiciously easy (he kept popping up when I tried to make Tony Blair too), which suggests either that his face is some kind of archetype, or that it's been fed into the software as one of the sample faces. FaceMachine generates women and East Asian faces too, but these seemed more difficult to control successfully.

I'm interested in the Gladwellian aspects of all this; the idea that we can think rather effectively using the unconscious and intuitive parts of our brain, rather than the empirical, observational parts. In "Blink: the power of thinking without thinking", Malcolm Gladwell looks at the two-second snap judgements we all make. We make them without sufficient "evidence". We make them in traffic, and our lives depend on them. Sometimes they're wrong, and they kill us. But a lot of the time they're right, and we survive to snap judge another day.



Gladwell actually doesn't like the word intuition; for him, a snap judgement is just rapid, rational thinking, sometimes right, sometimes wrong. I found myself making a succession of snap judgements as I slid the FaceMachine sliders. Those micro-judgements (does that look more like the person, or less?) accumulated into portraits as accurate as I could have come up with by looking at someone's face and drawing it, holding my pencil up to measure dimensions in units.

Another way of saying this: I may not know what you look like, but I can recognize when I see it... and when I don't. And a series of those recognitions can lead to a surprisingly acute representation of your face. As a musician, I work very much the same way. I can't specify in advance what I want something to sound like, but when I start listening to sounds I can very quickly reject the "wrong" ones and select the "right" ones. If you asked me to justify each decision I'd have a hard time explaining why those things are wrong or right, but my quickfire certainty is a big part of the way I operate as an artist. Nope, nope, nope, YES. Why? No idea.

Comments

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

To always look closely on someones face is interesting but it makes you quite nervous in the end to always do that.

[ex-newironsh15.livejournal.com]

patrick stewart!

kinda

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Patrick Stewart is difficult. The best I could come up with was this:

[(Anonymous)]

Can you do Anne Laplantine - OR ANY OF HER THREE OTHER TRACKS?????!!!!!!!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Anne Laplantine:

[(Anonymous)]

Is that her looking sad about you HOARDING THOSE TRACKS!! (subtle hint)

[(Anonymous)]

Patrick Stewart out of Star Trek? Impersonating Anthony Blair?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Tony Blair? This is Tony Blair:

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

They all look a bit dodgy, they have that knowing smirk!
how can we tell the face of a criminal? a terrorist even?

I read this after browsing Crime Mapping (http://www.jdi.ucl.ac.uk/crime_mapping/index.php) and Geoprofiling (http://gislounge.com/features/aa022102a.shtml), the kind of geography that indicates the geographical patterns of criminal activity.

I shall leave it to you to take this into the geopolitical if the fancy takes you.

Somehow, on a tangent from the Oedipal, i ended up on wikipedia's list of people with visual disabilities which you appear in. Now is that Alan Moore the drummer or Alan Moore the Glycon snake worshipper?

It seems there are other ways we recognise someone or something in our ways of seeing.

btw you ofen refer to scare quotes around words as in your reference to "wrong" and "right" in this piece. Is this because the "" looks like bat wings or is "scare" merely shorthand for a nervousness about "meaning"?

[(Anonymous)]

That's pretty good.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

"Scare quotes" is quite a normal term, isn't it? It designates a distance from the thing inside the marks, due to something problematical. It's shorthand for "We could have a long conversation about what this means, and how it doesn't mean what people usually take it to mean, but that's for another day". It's also a bit like those little mark-ups in Wikipedia where they say "disputed" or "citation needed" next to certain words.

riddled with fear of meaning

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

So its a common journalistic reference..I have seen it mimicked visually on comedy shows but not defined.
It was new to me, i guess.

Scare seems to me a loaded term.
I had seen it used sometimes as leverage in analysing someones statements. Almost like "designed to scare".

So if there is distance from or a problem with meaning in a conversation I can now see its utility as a shorthand time saver.

Intuitive thinking

[(Anonymous)]

People take this kind of thinking more and more seriously. In the February 17 issue of Science Magazine this study from Holland was published:

Title: On making the right choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect.

Abstract
Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not always advantageous to engage in thorough conscious deliberation before choosing. On the basis of recent insights into the characteristics of conscious and unconscious thought, we tested the hypothesis that simple choices (such as between different towels or different sets of oven mitts) indeed produce better results after conscious thought, but that choices in complex matters (such as between different houses or different cars) should be left to unconscious thought. Named the "deliberation-without-attention" hypothesis, it was confirmed in four studies on consumer choice, both in the laboratory as well as among actual shoppers, that purchases of complex products were viewed more favorably when decisions had been made in the absence of attentive deliberation.
---

So next time you want to buy a house, it is better to glance at the ads, make up your mind in like 30 sec. and then buy it. Imagine the time this will save for humanity !

/bug

Re: Intuitive thinking

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Having been to university, I do think that a lot of what you learn at that level involves suppressing your intuitive responses, doing a lot of (replicable and standardised) research, and coming up with... pretty much the same things you would've said to begin with, plus some data to back up why it's "objective" rather than "subjective" now. This has benefits -- sometimes you find out that counter-intuitive things are more true, or more apt for a particular use. It's related to "indirection" and "delay" too -- sometimes it's better to hold off on an answer. But it's also, in a lot of cases, a waste of time. A lot of the results are of the "any child off the street could've told you that" kind. (I'm talking about social science and psychology and so on, not nuclear physics, obviously).

The limits of words

[reflejos.livejournal.com]

For someone who is so aware of the limits of words you are very good reviewing music. There you try to "speak" music, and find a way to be very interesting, even very tough on the desicisions of others. I admire people who can describe their esthetic experiences, with music, movies, photographs. The description has a lot of value, maybe is their way of looking at them, the same can happen with a description of a face in a book, is not just the details, is trying to communicate a person (flesh and soul) and the perception of her.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know, Gladwell's an intellectual lightweight, and he's mostly just a self-marketer anyway. He writes for the New Yorker, yeah, but the post-Tina Brown New Yorker... as in, not exactly the home of quality journalism.

Re: Intuitive thinking

[(Anonymous)]

This also applies to natural sciences, I would think that most investigations are done with a clear idea what the result ought to be (and a secret hope that it will be more interesting than that). A Ph.D student friend of mine said that he could usually write the paper before doing the experiment, that the actual science was just to make the pictures ... but of course his intuition is fed with quite a lot of knowledge.

Re: Intuitive thinking

[la-aquarius.livejournal.com]

There's an interesting article in this month's Scientific American (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=00010347-101C-14C1-8F9E83414B7F4945&pageNumber=1&catID=2) about the process of so-called "intuition", applied to chess.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

It's actually been found that eyewitnesses are fairly unreliable and that event memories are quite malleable. It's been a favorite tactic of prosecutors here to get a psychiatrist to coach a witness into honestly believing that he or she was abused in some fashion.

The eyewitness has been the golden standard in law for centuries, and I'm sure they're right some of the time, but having someone who can say that they saw something isn't 100% as reliable as courts make it out to be.

Re: Intuitive thinking

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

I hope he meant every section but the results and discussion sections.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You only dislike Gladwell because you HATE AMERICA.

[desant012.livejournal.com]

I don't know, my opinion on Gladwell comes from reading the unformed and specious logic in his articles and some anecdotes about his lectures. He appeals mostly to the MBA crowd and is one of those marketing-trend gurus people in the business world like to namedrop (circa 2004-2005). The New Yorker these days is more a magazine to show you're reading rather than actually read, so it all seems to link together.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You probably don't like Richard Florida either, do you? AMERICA HATER!

Re: Intuitive thinking

[(Anonymous)]

Well, those sections are probably the ones most open to change, but if the result is the anticipated, also a big part of those could be written before the experiment (and after all part of those is usually about the inherent shortcomings of the method, what you are going to do next, wild speculation etc). It just shows that a lot of science does not try to answer 'How does it work?' but 'Does it work like this?', where 'this' is almost certain. This attraction to unchallenging questions is of course a result of a system where
the quantity, not quality of publications is used to reward scientists.

/bug

[(Anonymous)]

Generally speaking, the problem with eyewitnesses is that they're jealous of our freedoms...

http://thewebfairy.com/killtown/pentalawn.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N6Z_IhzBak
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p993fs5pR4U