Friday, December 7, 2007

Facial recognition and skin reflectance

Richard Russell, a postdoc at the Harvard Vision Sciences Laboratory, has just published a study that shows that minor differences in skin pigmentation are more critical to facial recognition than facial shape. In this study, “subjects were asked to recognise color images of the faces of their friends. The images were manipulated such that only reflectance or only shape information was useful for recognizing any particular face. Subjects were actually better at recognizing their friends’ faces from reflectance information than from shape information” (Russell & Sinha, 2007).

Mihai Moldovan has another paper showing that ruddiness acts as a signal of male dominance in humans, especially in a context of male-male competition (see my earlier post on this topic). I’ll have more to say when the paper comes out.

Reference

Russell R and Sinha P, (2007). Real-world face recognition: The importance of surface reflectance properties. Perception 36(9), 1368 – 1374

1 comment:

  1. Concluding, there's this fact of vital importance that PC-ness denies the variation between extant hominids, and those vast differences are certain to imply in irreconciliably behavioral differences with dramatic societal consequences.

    Governments should have HBD advisors, and all measures intending to create a good environment for the extant hominids should be informed about the proper habitats for each hominid (or "race" to use a PC euphemism).

    Ideally negroes would be moved back to savannahs, whites on temperate climates and Asians could be pretty much where they are. Areas of miscegenation, such as the Midde-East, are prone to conflict, so they ideally would be transformed into areas of environmental protection, uninhabited by humans, serving as a geographical barrier against unhealty miscegenation (actually, that would be just the restoration of the natural barriers actually). Just as we try to avoid miscegenation between "races" and chimps today, or different dog breeds, to avoid outbreeding depression. Only PC liberals deny that. How many more have to die in endless conflicts because of that? When will liberals bury the corpse of SJ Gould and start to accept reality as it is?

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