<p>Several movies have tried and failed to generate lifelike animations of humans.<br />For example, the lifeless faces in “Polar Express” made people uncomfortable because they tried to emulate life but didn’t get it quite right, reports the journal Psychological Science.<br /><br />“There’s something fundamentally important about seeing a face and knowing that the lights are on and someone is home,” says Thalia Wheatley of Dartmouth College, Britain, who co-wrote the study with graduate student Christine Looser. <br /><br />Humans can see faces in anything—the moon, a piece of toast, two dots and a line for a nose—but we are much more discriminating when it comes to deciding what is alive and what is not, according to a Dartmouth College statement. <br /><br />Wheatley and Looser set out to pin down the point at which a face starts to look alive. Looser drove around New Hampshire visiting toy stores and taking pictures of dolls’ faces. <br /><br />“It was fun trying to explain what we were doing to shopkeepers. I got some strange looks,” says Looser, who then paired each doll face with a similar-looking human face and used morphing software to blend the two. <br /><br />This made a whole continuum of intermediate pictures that were part human, part doll. Volunteers looked at each picture and decided which were human and which were dolls. <br /><br />Looser and Wheatley found that the tipping point, where people determined the faces to be alive, was about two-thirds of the way along the continuum, closer to the human side than to the doll side. <br /><br />Another experiment found that the eyes were the most important feature for determining life. <br /><br />The results suggest that people scrutinise faces, particularly the eyes, for evidence that a face is alive. <br /><br />Objects with faces may look human, but telling the difference lets us reserve our social energies for faces that are capable of thinking, feeling, and interacting <br />with us. <br /><br />“I think we all seek connections with others,” Wheatley says. When we recognise life in a face, she says, we think, “This is a mind I can connect with.”<br /></p>
<p>Several movies have tried and failed to generate lifelike animations of humans.<br />For example, the lifeless faces in “Polar Express” made people uncomfortable because they tried to emulate life but didn’t get it quite right, reports the journal Psychological Science.<br /><br />“There’s something fundamentally important about seeing a face and knowing that the lights are on and someone is home,” says Thalia Wheatley of Dartmouth College, Britain, who co-wrote the study with graduate student Christine Looser. <br /><br />Humans can see faces in anything—the moon, a piece of toast, two dots and a line for a nose—but we are much more discriminating when it comes to deciding what is alive and what is not, according to a Dartmouth College statement. <br /><br />Wheatley and Looser set out to pin down the point at which a face starts to look alive. Looser drove around New Hampshire visiting toy stores and taking pictures of dolls’ faces. <br /><br />“It was fun trying to explain what we were doing to shopkeepers. I got some strange looks,” says Looser, who then paired each doll face with a similar-looking human face and used morphing software to blend the two. <br /><br />This made a whole continuum of intermediate pictures that were part human, part doll. Volunteers looked at each picture and decided which were human and which were dolls. <br /><br />Looser and Wheatley found that the tipping point, where people determined the faces to be alive, was about two-thirds of the way along the continuum, closer to the human side than to the doll side. <br /><br />Another experiment found that the eyes were the most important feature for determining life. <br /><br />The results suggest that people scrutinise faces, particularly the eyes, for evidence that a face is alive. <br /><br />Objects with faces may look human, but telling the difference lets us reserve our social energies for faces that are capable of thinking, feeling, and interacting <br />with us. <br /><br />“I think we all seek connections with others,” Wheatley says. When we recognise life in a face, she says, we think, “This is a mind I can connect with.”<br /></p>