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Psychology: Why faces you draw look a bit Neanderthal

Introversion

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Most people draw faces with the eyes too high on the head, an effect that researchers think may come from an illusion caused by the shape of the head.


Science News said:
Let’s try an experiment: Draw a face. Nothing fancy, just an oval with eyes, nose, mouth, some hair.

What you’ve produced probably looks like a cartoon Neandertal. Just about everyone tends to draw faces with the eyes too high on the head, resulting in a low forehead and a rather cretinous look.

It’s not just a matter of artistic talent. Psychology researchers (not to mention generations of art teachers) have noticed that everyone does it. That got Claus-Christian Carbon, who studies visual perception, wondering. Why don’t we know where people’s eyes are on their head? After all, humans are intensely social creatures who are highly attuned to reading each other’s faces. The eyes, in particular, get a lot of our attention.

In reality, your eyes are right about in the middle of your head, measured vertically. But most people draw them definitively above center.

...

So the researchers came up with three hypotheses, reported in March in Perception, to explain why normal people, and even people who study faces for a living, might not be able to put eyes in the right place. Here they are, in my own subjective order of increasing weirdness:

Hair-as-hat hypothesis: People don’t think of the hair as part of the head, but as sitting on top of the head like a hat (at least when they’re drawing a face). So they relate eye position to what’s seen as the “face” rather than considering where the eyes are on the head as a whole.

Head-as-box hypothesis: People don’t take the convexity (roundness) of the forehead into account, so the top of the head is assumed to be lower than it really is.

Face-from-below hypothesis: Babies first see faces mostly from below, and this view sets a mental map of sorts that is hard to erase later in life.

So far, the results seem to favor the second hypothesis, head as box. Analysis of the relative length of the faces that people drew showed the heads to be too short compared with the models they were based on. The hairlines, on the other hand, were drawn in the correct relative position, causing the forehead to be too small.

“As humans we have trouble assessing round shapes,” Carbon says. “Herman Munster has a really nonconvex head. That’s maybe the only person in the world whose head you might estimate correctly.”

...
Click to expand...
 
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Interesting. I remember learning that the eyes were in the middle of the face when I took and art class back in high school. It always felt weird to draw them that way, even though it's correct.

I have a fourth hypothesis why: our self perception of our own faces is weighted towards the lower parts of the face, below the eyes, because we have a greater density of nerve endings in that area than almost anywhere else on the body (except the fingertips). Look at one of those sensory cortex homunculi to see what I mean. The lower face is huge but the forehead and head above the hairline is tiny in terms of brain real estate devoted to them.

We often draw things the way they "feel" not the way they actually look. This may be why people have so many problems with perspective and so on when learning to draw, and probably why little kids tend to draw pictures with the sky scraped across the top and the ground on the very bottom. The sky is "up" and the ground is "down" and everything else is in the middle. darn it!

Though looking at my husband sitting next to me, with his bangs coming down almost to his eyebrows, it does "look" like the area above his eyes is smaller than the area below them too. Or maybe it's just him? I will have to wait until he is completely bald to find out.
 
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Helix

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Or a lot of people who draw faces are actually quite poor observers. Have you seen how badly many people draw faces in profile? It's as if they've never encountered another human being in their lives.
 
Chris P

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Fascinating. As I was reading the snippet, a combo of the first two was my guess: because the hair or forehead are empty space, people tend to ignore them and fill the space available with the features the notice. I'll bet if people draw the outline of cities on a blank map of a country or state they would over-estimate the size of the cities. The part where the hairlines are drawn in the correct place goes against my "hair as ignorable space" hypothesis, though.
 
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Introversion said:
Why wait that long? He sleeps, right? You have scissors, right? :ROFL:
Click to expand...
:roll:

Maybe don't try this at home, though.

Helix said:
Or a lot of people who draw faces are actually quite poor observers. Have you seen how badly many people draw faces in profile? It's as if they've never encountered another human being in their lives.
Click to expand...
As someone who sucks at drawing faces in profile, I'm not sure it's that simple. (Or my pride hopes it's not... :ROFL:)

Observing and copying what you see on page are for me two different things. Hand coordination comes also in play. Heck how many people know what a circle looks like, but trying to draw a perfect one is not given to everyone, and that's a lot simpler than a portrait.
 
Kjbartolotta

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Is there a scientific reason why drawing hands is terrible and they always look like garbage?
 
Roxxsmom

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Kjbartolotta said:
Is there a scientific reason why drawing hands is terrible and they always look like garbage?
Click to expand...

Hands are really hard to draw too. Maybe it's because the fingers are hard to get just so, but that's another part of the body with lots of nerve endings.

I still think some of the reason is because of how we perceive these body parts on ourselves.
 
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