The Geography of Faces

How much can you tell about where someone comes from, just from their face?

The other day I was in London and came across a group of young people in Muslim attire who were waving (or in some cases wearing) a particular flag. I thought it was the Iranian flag, but, I thought, they didn't look Iranian. They looked more like Somalis, but it certainly wasn't the blue and white Somali flag. I decided that maybe they were some kind of pro-Iranian demonstrators, but I later worked out that it was the flag of the unrecognised state of Somaliland.

This got me thinking about how reliable these "they look they're from..." judgements are.

Clearly on a basic level, we can usually tell which continent someone's ancestors were from, in terms of the familiar "races" of Europeans, Africans, East Asians etc. But what about shorter distances?


Could you tell, just from looking at them (and setting aside dress, hairstyle, jewellery etc.) whether someone was from Spain as opposed to France? Korea or Japan? Russia or Germany?

I can only speak for England, but there's certainly a vague but widespread belief that every part of Europe has a  distinct 'look'. In the past, people were very fond of talking about that kind of thing; today, we're rather embarrassed by the idea but the belief lives on.

I don't know, but I'd be very surprised if there weren't analogous beliefs in other countries.

But how accurate are these folk beliefs, really?

Supposing you were the world expert on human faces - or suppose you were a supercomputer with face-recognition software and access to Facebook's entire dataset. How accurately could you place someone's origins on the map, on average? To within 1000 km? 100? With what degree of accuracy? In an ideal world, could the ultimate face-placer judge someone as French vs German 75% of the time? 90%? Or only slightly better than chance?

I suspect that if you researched this, you'd find that a supercomputer could do very well, in most parts of the world, but that the majority of actual people are less accurate than they think they are.

The Evolutionary Psychology of Race, Beauty and Marriage

There are some papers that you can tell are going to be hot potatoes just from the titles. This is one of them: A Facial Attractiveness Account of Gender Asymmetries in Interracial Marriage.

Coming so soon after The Unconquered World, you'd be forgiven for thinking I am taking this blog in a more linkbaiting direction because I'm planning to introduce ads. I'm really not, it's just a coincidence.

The paper claims that white women are on average more attractive than black, while East Asians are prettier still.  For men, however, the positions were reversed (and the effects were even stronger.)

Saying that black women are on average less attractive than others was what got evolutionary psychologist and blogger Satoshi Kanazawa into spot of bother last year. The current paper agrees with Kanazawa on that point (though doesn't cite him)... although it also declares Kanazawa to be part of the least attractive race for males, so I don't know how happy he'll be about it.

Author Michael B. Lewis of Cardiff University took 600 Facebook photos "from people who were members of groups associated with further and higher education bodies either in the UK (for White faces), sub-Saharan Africa (for Black faces) and East Asia (for Asian faces)."

Photos with a "weird expression" and people who "looked" under 18 or over 30 were excluded. The actual ages were not checked. Hmm.

A panel of 40 British students (half male) were asked to rate all of the opposite-sex faces for attractiveness from 1 to 10. The ethnicity of the rater made no difference to the results but there were only 5 black and 6 Asian students out of 40 though:

After this we get some models proposing how these data might relate to British and American inter-racial marriage patterns, and some evolutionary speculation regarding why this might have evolved - Asia was cold so men were in short supply, that kind of thing - but that's all assuming the basic data are solid.

There are many possible objections to the methodology here, some of which are addressed in the paper, but there's one massive that isn't -

It's not stated how the Facebook images were gathered. All we're told is that "a research assistant" got the images from higher education institutions. Were they, consciously or subconsciously, picking photos that fitted the expected some pattern?

We're not told whether or not this individual was aware of the hypothesis of the study when they chose the pics. If they were aware, it's a fatal confound; (Edit - 19th Feb 2012 - The paper in fact says that the research assistant was "naive" i.e. that they were not aware of the hypothesis of the study, which is of course sound methodology. I missed this statement in the first version of this post.)

However, the broader point remains that they might have been selecting in line with their own preferences, or some other bias. Clearly, there's much room for cherry picking the examples, based on whether they "looked" too young or old, or had a "weird" expression...

Link: Also blogged about here.

Lewis, M. (2012). A Facial Attractiveness Account of Gender Asymmetries in Interracial Marriage PLoS ONE, 7 (2) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0031703

The Hidden Face Within

One of these two images contains a hidden picture of a face. Which one?

This was the question faced by participants in a remarkable psychology experiment just published, Measuring Internal Representations from Behavioral and Brain Data.

Five healthy volunteers were presented with a series of random black and white grid patterns. Each grid square was either black or white, and this was randomly determined on each trial.

There was no pattern to the images, they were completely random. But the subjects were told that half of the patterns contained a hidden face, and that their job was to work out which ones did. Each subject saw over 10,000 random images and they took about 1 second to judge each one.


The volunteers "detected" a face in 44% of the images. Somehow, all five of them convinced themselves that they were seeing faces in many of the grids. The authors say that

Upon completion of the experiment we debriefed observers, and all expressed shock that no face was ever presented.

That's strange enough in itself, but here's the really clever bit. The authors compared the patterns which were declared to contain a face, to the ones that were reported as empty. The image below shows the average "face" grid, minus the average "non face" grid, for each individual subject:

As you can see, this reveals...a face! Kind of. The top half shows the raw average; the bottom half shows the statistically significant differences from random noise.

In Subjects 1 and 2, the face is pretty clear, with eyes, a nose and a mouth. For 3 and 4, it's less coherent, but you might be able to see it if you look hard enough. For Subject 5, not really.

What this means is that people (at least, most of them) were not just seeing faces in any noise. They tended to see faces when the random patterns happened to resemble a kind of primitive face, but it was a different face for each person. The authors say that these strange faces correspond to the individual's internal representations, or models, of "a face", that each subject was "seeing" in the noise.

Finally, the whole experiment was conducted while EEG data was being recorded from the participant's brains. The EEG results revealed that there was a clear difference in the neural activity associated with "face" compared to "nonface" stimuli - except in Subject 5, who you'll remember had the least coherent "internal face".

What's exciting about this approach is that it investigates perception in a purely "top down" way. Normally, when we look at anything, what we end up perceiving is a product of "bottom up" influences - the raw data - and "top down" ones - what we expect to see. In this experiment, there was no real "bottom up" data; it was all "top down".

This is a form of pareidolia - perceiving familiar things in random stimuli. Seeing the face of Jesus in your sock, that kind of thing. It works for sounds too: in the famous White Christmas Experiment, people report "hearing" music in pure white noise - when told to expect it. Real-life examples of this include the "Islam Is The Light" doll, and my personal favorite, the singing paedophile Christmas mouse.

Finally, I wonder what embodied cognition theorists make of this paper. Because this paper claims to be "Measuring Internal Representations from Behavioral and Brain Data"; embodied cognition (at least the radical kind) is the theory that "internal representations" either don't exist, or at least don't explain anything about human cognition.

Smith, M., Gosselin, F., and Schyns, P. (2012). Measuring Internal Representations from Behavioral and Brain Data Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.11.061