“Until now the full capacity of horse facial expressions to convey a range of information has been largely overlooked.” This lack of capacity was addressed by the most recent (2015) addition to the AnimalFACS system. (FACS stands for Facial Action Coding System) EquiFACS which is “a scientific observational tool for identifying and coding facial movements […]
Tag: facial
Facial Pain and the Instruments of Finnish Orchestra Musicians
Aki Savolainen writes: “I found this one article my father was working on a year ago, which found out that musicians with sleep bruxism experience pain related to the severity of their symptoms (surprise), and the instrument they happen to be playing has no effect on the amount of pain experienced.” The study is: “Oro-facial […]
Nose-Raising, Nose-Lengthening and Grimacing (facial actions study)
Researcher Paul Zeichner (artist, illustrator and educator) adds to the literature regarding the documented lists of human facial actions, with the observation that “Seldom-mentioned facial movements referred to here as nose-lengthening and grimacing should also be recognized in related patterns of expression.” See: Nose-Raising, Nose-Lengthening and Grimacing : Expressions of Arousal, Vigilance, Confusion, Aversion and […]
fMRI and meaningless lower-face acts
Improbable can find but one formal scientific study which features investigations of fMRI monitored responses to meaningless lower-face acts (a.k.a. ‘gurns’). Experiments carried out in year 2000, under the protocols of the UK’s Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital Research Ethics Committee, were designed to answer the question: ‘Can the cortical substrates for speechreading be distinguished […]
Three cases of discomforting hair in funny places
Further examples of the occasional medical drawbacks of facial hair and of haircuts: “Facial fuzz and funny findings — Facial hair causing otalgia and oropharyngeal pain,” Francis A. Papay [pictured here], Howard L. Levine, and William A. Schiavone, Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, vol. 56, no. 3, 1989, pp. 273-276. The authors report: “Three patients […]
Computerised gender classification (part 1: eyebrows)
Can you tell a person’s gender from just a glimpse of their eyebrows? Could a computerised system do the same? To find out, a project was undertaken by Yujie Dong (of the Holcombe Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Clemson University) and Damon L. Woodard (now at the Biometrics and Pattern Recognition Lab, University of […]
A wokfull of cockroaches – observing observers
The facial analysis system behind the recently featured ‘Laughing Mirror‘was developed by the Dutch firm VicarVision [* see note below] A description of their system, called ‘FaceReader ™ ‘ was published in Proceedings of Measuring Behavior, 2005 (Wageningen, 30 August – 2 September 2005) ‘The FaceReader: Online facial expression recognition‘ Since then the computer code has […]
The growths and declines of facial hair on Londoners
Not being a barber, and not having had an adulthood that spanned 130 years, Dwight E Robinson was in no position to report firsthand the frequency of changes in relative prevalence of sideburns, moustaches and beards in London during the years 1842-1972. He used an indirect source: issues of the Illustrated London News published during that time. […]
Facial hair and accused anthrax scientists
A new PBS Frontline documentary looks at the morass of accusations — about anthrax terrorism — aimed at two US government scientists, Bruce Ivins and Steven Hatfill, who worked at Fort Dietrick, Maryland. The case against either man has turned out to be less than clear. In all the media discussion of this case, almost […]
Snood Erections in Wild Turkeys
What’s the origin of facial erections in turkeys? The snood — the long fleshy appendage above the beak, is what erects, becoming red as it engorges with blood. (The snood photos we reproduce here are from the Homegrown Hobby Farm blog.) Rebecca T. Kimball and Edward L. Braun of the University of Florida explain at […]