7.13.2011

Illusion Turns Pretty Women Into Freaky Monsters

It's called the flashed face distortion effect, and it's one of the freakiest illusions you've likely seen.

The illusion was discovered accidentally by Sean C Murphy, along with colleagues Jason M Tangen and Matthew B Thompson.

According to the abstract:

We describe a novel face distortion effect resulting from the fast-paced presentation of eye-aligned faces. When cycling through the faces on a computer screen, each face seems to become a caricature of itself and some faces appear highly deformed, even grotesque. The degree of distortion is greatest for faces that deviate from the others in the set on a particular dimension (eg if a person has a large forehead, it looks particularly large). This new method of image presentation, based on alignment and speed, could provide a useful tool for investigating contrastive distortion effects and face adaptation.

Follow the instructions accompanying the video and see for yourself.

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