Study Says the Eyes Are the Window to the Soul

A new study conducted by Thalia Wheatley and graduate student Christine Looser of Dartmouth College, wanted to find out what element on a face, tells people if that face is alive or not.

The face of a doll can look like that of a human but it will never be alive, and telling this difference allows people to pay attention to faces that belong to living things, to which they can interact.

The question is where is the line between human and doll faces, and what makes a face look alive.

This new study concluded that a face needs to look very much like that of a human in order to look alive, and the secret is in the eyes.

For their research, Looser drove around New Hampshire, visited toy stores and took pictures of dolls' faces.

She says that “it was fun trying to explain what we were doing to shopkeepers,” and “I got some strange looks.”

After taking the photos, she paired each doll face with a similar-looking human face and used morphing software to blend the two, obtaining a whole continuum of intermediate pictures that were part human, part doll.

Looser and Wheatley then had volunteers looking at each picture and decide which were human and which were dolls.

They concluded that the point where people said the faces were alive was about two-thirds of the way along the continuum, closer to the human picture than to the doll side.

An additional experiment found that the determining criteria for determining life were the eyes, because people analyze faces and especially the eyes in order to find evidence of life.

There are many objects with faces that look human but telling the difference between them and real people, allows us to save energy for the faces that can think, feel and interact with us.

The researchers say that there were several movies that tried, unsuccessfully, to generate lifelike animations, like the lifeless faces in Polar Express, but they only made people feel uncomfortable because they failed to imitate life.

Thalia Wheatley said that “there's something fundamentally important about seeing a face and knowing that the lights are on and someone is home.”

People can see faces in many things but they are also aware when a face is alive or not, and Wheatley believes that humans “all seek connections with others,” and when a face looks alive, people believe that they can connect to that mind.

This new study was published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

See examples of the morphed faces used in the experiments here: