What A Crazy Little Child You Are! Discussion Facial autophotophobia is the fear of the picture of one own's face. Many scientists have done research and experiments on subjects like this one. They have concluded many things, such as Faces are special or unique in some way that makes their encoding highly orientation sensitive, which means that it is harder to recognize faces and their features on familiar faces when they are changed in any way. They have also concluded that the majority of children (ages 14 and below) had faster responses to pictures and words when inverted or rotated than adults. (Searcy, 1996, pg 904)(Brooks, 1963, pg 1033-1034)

These scientists have done experimentations mostly on comparing children's recognition to an adult's recognition of objects and faces. Many of their results indicated that there is a direct relation between age and the ability to correctly identify inverted or reversed pictures. Researchers also found that recognition of a pictured object was facilitated by earlier exposure to the same or a different picture of the object. The subjects in those experiments easily recognized familiar objects when inverted, but unfamiliar objects were difficult to recognize. (Brooks, 1963, pg 1036)(Bruce, 1985, pg 373)

A more appropriate formulation is that the encoding of faces is especially reliant on some type of information whose processing depends on the observer's expertise as well as orientation. One theory is that both spatial-relational information and component information are encoded into a visual representation. One scientist, Kohlev, noted that the difficulty in recognizing upside-down faces was the loss of facial expression, which may also be caused by reversing the photo. Studies haven't shown yet the extent to which the difficulty in viewing upside-down faces are related specifically to

the face, or if it has something to do with facial symmetry. The recognition of faces when they are upside-down in photographs is less than the recognition of faces when they are right-side up in photographs. Another scientist noted that an alternative hypothesis would be that any set of objects customarily seen in one orientation (such as faces) might be more difficult to recognize when inverted or reversed. He also tested whether a general impairment on mono-oriented objects when inverted could account for the difficulty with viewing upside-down faces. (Yin, 1969, pg 141)(Searcy, 1996, pg 905)

The identification of a person's face represents a tremendous achievement of the perceptual and cognitive system. Correct identification in photographs was distinctly less in the younger age groups (ages 14 and below) than in the older (ages 35 and up). It is possible that facial encoding involve two modes of processing, one using piecemeal features such as eyes, nose, and mouth, and the other spatial relations. When recognizing somebody's face, we must see more than just their eyes, nose, and mouth, we must see a relationship between the different features, that comes naturally. John Searcy's concern about spatial-relational recognition comes from his experiments with inversion. (Searcy, 1996, pg 904)(Bruce, 1985, pg 373)(Brooks, 1963, pg 1037)

When experimenting, Karl Grammar limited all possible variables to those that he could not control. Using light sources on each side of the subjects face, shading was prevented. They were each positioned to look directly into the camera so that there was no tilt of the head. Grammar also determined facial symmetry by measuring points on the outermost and innermost parts of the eye corners, the leftmost and rightmost point of the nose in the lower nose region. Jaw width was measured as face width at the y coordinate of the mouth corners, and a final point was at the lowest point of the chin curvature. Overall facial asymmetry was based on the sum of all possible nonredundant differences between the midpoints of five horizontal lines. The midpoint of each line

was calculated using the formula ([Left point - Right point] / 2 + the right point. On a perfectly symmetrical face, each midpoint lies on the same line. (Grammar, 1994, pg 234-235)

Table-1 displays the number of mirror image photos chosen by each subject and the overall facial symmetry in this research. Computation of correlation by the Whole-Score Method has indicated no statistical significance at the 95% confidence level between the overall facial symmetry and number of mirror image photos chosen. Correlation of .32 does not fall outside the range of -0.59 to +0.59 which would be expected if the true correlation was equal to zero. Therefore, no statistical significance was found.

Likewise, Table-2 demonstrates that student choices of teachers' photographs revealed no statistically significant correlation to teachers' overall facial symmetry. Correlation of .18 falls within the statistically insignificant range of -0.874 to +0.874.

Perhaps the facial symmetry of the subjects did not have the greatest significance as to why the pictures were chosen. One possible factor that is unknown would be how long the subjects look in the mirror each day. Another factor is that the photos were taken in black and white film, and possibly because we live in a color world, the subjects may not have recognized themselves as easily as they might have in a color photograph. One more factor is that no precaution was used to have lighting on both sides of the face, so there may have been some shadowing on the subjects faces, which may have caused a slight, but effective, distraction.

Further research would be to determine if the color film has an effect on the way the subjects distinguish themselves, and possibly use both black and white film and color film. Another possible research idea would be to have the subjects each identify other people's photos, and see what their perceptions on reversed images or inverted images are.
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