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Flashed Face Distortion Effect, aka our brains are creepy.

nilbog

nilbog

Member
Oct 25, 2017
15,205
I've seen this before but it always weirds me out. This might explain why I sometimes think I saw something strange in my peripheral vision.

What is Flashed Face Distortion Effect?

When normal faces are rapidly presented in the visual periphery, they are perceived as grotesque and distorted. This phenomenon, "The flashed-face distortion effect" (FFDE) is a powerful illusion that may reveal important properties of how faces are coded in peripheral vision. Despite the strength of the illusion (and its popularity), there has been almost no follow-up work to examine what governs the strength of the illusion or to develop a clear account of its phenomenology.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-37991-9#:~:text=Introduction,faces have been presented1.

Give it a try, keep your eyes on the cross in the middle:

WARNING: May see disturbing images, this is only an illusion.


View: https://youtu.be/_fW9uWFXRpQ?si=Fa67sV8RceXGsCcQ

Try it on celebs:


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT9i99D_9gI

The effect has been applied to Hollywood celebrities, and won 2nd Place in the 8th Annual Best Illusion of the Year contest held in 2012 under the aegis of the Vision Sciences Society. The phenomenon, which has gone viral on YouTube, also represents an example of scientific phenomenology which outstrips (in this case) neurological theory.

According to Susanna Martinez-Conde, president of the Neural Correlate Society:

These are the best illusions of the year, so they're very new by definition. You're going to know the phenomenology first, and the neural underpinnings second. Typically, we don't know why these illusions work in the brain. We may have theories, but the experiments have not been done, because it's too early.
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A 2019 paper in Scientific Reports found that the effect is equally strong when the faces are upside down. This suggests that the effect is independent of the face perception functionality of the human brain, which tends to react much stronger to right-side up faces than to inverted faces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashed_face_distortion_effect
 
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Bengraven

Bengraven

Member
Oct 26, 2017
26,913
Florida
When I stared at the cross, it gave me a ton of Oblivion NPC faces.

Am I okay or do studies say I'm normal and even non Bethesda gamers see it…
 
mbpm

mbpm

Member
Oct 25, 2017
23,675
I could imagine Mike Flanagan making an okay low budget horror movie about this concept
 
Walter White Walker

Walter White Walker

Member
Oct 27, 2017
21,545
The celebrity one works better for me as the faces go by quickly but not too quickly. And yeah, they're pretty messed up looking.
 
Common Knowledge

Common Knowledge

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,262
This is the few split seconds where we perceive reality correctly and see our true forms, until the facade takes over again….
 
Tater

Tater

Member
Oct 30, 2017
2,595
Ok, this blew my mind. Sort of like those experiments where they highlight the permanent blind spot we all have in our eye, and the brain just photoshops right over it.
 
BLEEN

BLEEN

Member
Oct 27, 2017
21,894
c8f74d64f04741bcac494bc5402e2539
They should try with different focal lengths. I think that's what does most of the work

Focal-length-template_v2.jpg
 
Mesoian

Mesoian

▲ Legend ▲
Member
Oct 28, 2017
26,613
Huh.

Is this the basis behind TES character design? It embodies the same harshness as these peripheral views.
 
Pau

Pau

Self-Appointed Godmother of Bruce Wayne's Children
Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,861
Damn, that's pretty drastic. I do wonder if the magnitude of the distortion changes from person to person. Because it's pretty bad for me.
 
MZZ

MZZ

Member
Nov 2, 2017
4,279
Very interesting. The effect seems to occupy near or at the blindspot area?

It looks as if the face is being squished but it seems to be doing more of that. More like a caricature drawing of the face. Maybe the brain is combining both sides to fill in the information in the blindspot.

Given how much our brains parse so much details about the face and can see very miniscule details, this is super weird that its doing this lol. I can catch the image morph to normal for a split second.
 
steejee

steejee

Member
Oct 28, 2017
8,637
Neat, and pretty logical behavior I'd say.

To me they kinda gave off a "Low poly Level of Detail models" effect, which melds with that your brain wants to save your processing for what you're focused on.

The video is a *very* good example of why Foveated Rendering would be useful - the extra detail in the periphery is just wasted anyways.
 
Davidion

Davidion

Charitable King
Member
Oct 27, 2017
6,114
How come yo mama's face doesn't get any less grotesque when I'm staring straight at her?


It's otherwise a pretty cool effect though. Stupid brain
 

Zache

Unshakable Resolve
The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
2,794
How often are you going to have people's faces flash in and out of your immediate peripheral anyway? Probably just something that fell through the cracks.
 
Eidan

Eidan

Avenger
Oct 30, 2017
8,579
I'm not sure if I'm processing this stuff correctly. All I'm noticing in my periphery is just a bunch of differently shaped faces and heads.
 
plagiarize

plagiarize

It's not a loop. It's a spiral.
Moderator
Oct 25, 2017
27,585
Cape Cod, MA
So when I look at the faces directly, I see all the similarities, and when I look at the cross the differences are all exagerated.

Like, if the next one has a slightly bigger nose, my brain sees a WAY bigger nose when I'm looking at the cross.

Fascinating!
 
Spaggy

Spaggy

Member
Oct 26, 2017
602
It's weird cus I could tell which celebrities were flashing in my periphery, even if Will Farrell transformed into a smeared cyclops in my mind and Brad Pitt had a weird, slanted and inflated head.
 
Mango Pilot

Mango Pilot

Member
Apr 8, 2024
311
Zache said:
How often are you going to have people's faces flash in and out of your immediate peripheral anyway? Probably just something that fell through the cracks.
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Not devoting energy to examining faces in the periphery and having them look distorted probably is beneficial. Someone who were not focusing looking fucked up and causing distress probably protects us since we don't like being snuck up on.

Wonder if something similar happens with animals
 
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