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• Call me a guy with a cognitive science degree if you must - but this posting is a an accidental mind hack.

  First, two observations about human vision:
  1) Human brains are very good at detecting faces, even in the presence of noise
  2) Human visual acuity is such that as objects move towards the periphery of the eye (away from the fovea) details become less clear.

  Now, scroll back up and look at the paused youtube image of the face. Black and white face with a light grey arrow over the top of it, right? Now look at the text around the youtube window - if you pay attention you'll notice that at some distance away, your brain still sees the face and recognizes it, but the arrow just disappears. If you look back, of course the arrow hasn't gone anywhere, but as the visual detail drops off, your face-recognition center takes over and "fixes" the noise.

  Anyhow - creepy mannequin in either case, but hooray for the accidental cogsci demo.

  Posted by: Johnath on November 7, 2006 at 6:13 AM

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