On 4/6/2011 5:07 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/6/2011 16:09, Kevin Wampler wrote:
>> were people who had significantly more trouble reading eyes of actors but
>
> I don't know. If you had an actor give a fake smile and asked "what is
> this expression?" almost everyone would say "smile." But if the smile
> doesn't reach the eyes, that's not going to work well.
>

Certainly, but in that case you'd expect that *everyone* would have 
trouble answering the question, so it's not going to impact where you 
fall with respect to the average score (which is what they measure in 
the study).  The effect you're talking about is really determined by the 
variance in the ability of different people to judge acted versus real 
eye expressions.  I'm sure there is a variance, but I'd imagine that 
it's smaller than the variance in overall ability in reading eye 
expressions.

Another point is that they *do* find that people perform much better 
than random chance at selecting the right expression from the eyes 
alone.  They also found some other statistically significant in the 
abilities of different subgroups which perhaps make intuitive sense: 
women performed slightly better than men, and autistic spectrum people 
performed worse than non-autistic people.  To me this points that they 
are clearly measuring *something* useful.  It's probably not exactly 
equivalent to what they'd really like to study (ie. real expressions) 
but it seems about as close as you can easily get in a controlled study 
-- certainly close enough to draw some cautious conclusions from.  I 
mean, you're studying humans here, you shouldn't expect a proof of 
correctness.

As an aside, they found a few other interesting things too.  For 
instance for "simple" expressions like happiness, sadness, anger, etc. 
the whole face conveyed significantly more information than the mouth or 
eyes alone, and the mouth and eyes both conveyed about equal amounts of 
information.  For "complex" expressions like sarcasm, pensiveness, 
refection, etc. on the other hand the eyes seemed to be the most useful 
thing in conveying the expressions.  Also interesting was that the 
autistic spectrum people only seemed to have significant trouble with 
the complex expressions, but not with the simple ones.  I actually found 
it to be a pretty interesting paper to skim -- not that I actually know 
anything about the field of course.

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