perception

perception

Face perception research

Faces play a crucial role in interpersonal contact. We often put on a face, hide our true feelings, or reveal them. We are obsessed with the appearance of the face, its modifications, and improvements. We have created an entire sophisticated system for naming features and the stereotypes associated with them. The face is the part of the body that greatly simplifies interpersonal communication and aids in understanding speech. What helps is that facial appearance may have conditioned communication through words. It is therefore important to understand what influences the attribution of human characteristics based on facial appearance.

Studies shows that:

People from different parts of the world, often very isolated, can agree on the description of the faces in the photographs presented. A face that looks beautiful to you probably looks beautiful to the Japanese and Portuguese.
Other times, people from the same town disagree. For example, one may live in a good address and the other in a poor, unhealthy or dangerous environment.
Some studies show that the facial perception of the same person also changes. All it takes is getting older, changing social status, or breaking up from a relationship.

Evolutionary psychology has been studying these phenomena for over thirty years. The questions are coming faster than the answers. Can we ever fully understand the perception of faces?

The most difficult part of research on the perception of facial features tends to be getting ratings from random people.

If you are interested in our project(s) and would like to receive further information (e.g., that there’s a new survey we are collecting data for, that there is a new blog post out, or that we happened to get our results published as a paper in peer-reviewed journal), please leave us your email address:


    Thank you very much!

    On behalf of the research team:

    Mgr. Vojtěch Fiala, PhD
    vfiala@umk.pl

    Dr. Hab. Sławomir Wacewicz, prof UMK

    prof. Mgr. Karel Kleisner, Ph.D.
    karel.kleisner@natur.cuni.cz

    Centre for Language Evolution Studies,
    Faculty of Humanities, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń

    Katedra filosofie a dějin přírodních věd
    Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague

    Still need more info?

    Go here etologiecloveka.cz (my colleagues have a cool webpage).

    Learn how it all has started in my dissertation thesis.

    Or visit a slightly outdated page, related to my research at cles.umk.pl

    Etologie člověka

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