A new series of studies we are running in the lab is examining pupil responses to faces. We want to test if the pupil responds differently, by contracting and dilating, to human faces and also to macaque (a type of monkey) faces.
| Face | Scramble | Symmetric Scramble |
|---|---|---|
The pupil responds to changes in light in order for you to see in bright light or in darkness, so we have to control for any differences in light levels in the different types of faces. This way we can compare the pupil responses between faces and images that are not faces, but have some of the same visual properties as faces. We do this by scrambling the faces so that they retain all the same visual information (middle image). Since the face images we use are symmetrical, we also make the scrambled faces symmetrical (right image).