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In addition to being loaded with unholy amounts of sugar, the cold breakfast cereals most American children enjoy are actually conducting covert psychological operations on them, according to researchers at Cornell University.
The researchers found that cereals marketed to kids are placed half as high on supermarket shelves as adult cereals, and that the average angle of the gaze of cereal spokes-characters on cereal boxes marketed to kids is downward at a 9.6 degree angle whereas spokes-characters on adult cereal look almost straight ahead. Findings show, for example, that brand trust was 16% higher and the feeling of connection to the brand was 28% higher when that Trix rabbit makes eye contact.
In short, the researchers' advice if you don't want your kids going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs is not to call the police, just don't take your kids down the cereal aisle in the grocery store.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by codermotor on Thursday April 10 2014, @01:46AM
Direct eye contact of the character or person depicted in art (photo, painting, drawing, etc.) is apparent only when the subject is looking directly at the (virtual) camera lens.
If more than one viewer is present, and the subject is looking at an angle, it will appear to all viewers that the subject is looking at the viewer(s) who, from the secondary viewers' perspective, are in line with the apparent gaze of the subject. IOW, if Jack, on the left, and Jill on right of the image are both looking at the image of a person whose gaze appears to be to Jill's right, Jack will see the image looking at Jill, but Jill will see the image as looking to her right.
The illusion of a person or character looking directly at any first-person viewer is only possible if that image is looking straight out of the picture. Angling the gaze of the image will always make the subject appear to be looking somewhere else. Angling the subject's gaze downward will give the illusion to all viewers that the subject is looking below the viewer's eye level.
It doesn't take a research project to test this. It's known to every graphic artist and photographer.
So, any attempt to make characters on cereal boxes look "down" at children is nonsense. The correlation of the downward gaze of the character and trust in children is meaningless - unless children prefer indirect eye contact?
(Score: 1) by codermotor on Thursday April 10 2014, @01:50AM
Oops! Title of the post should have been:
Eye Contact in Art: It Doesn't Work That Way
Doh!
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by tynin on Thursday April 10 2014, @02:10AM
It feels like you should have kept with your broken english response that you are trying to correct. Instead of "It Work That Way", the correction should have been, "It Don't Work That Way". Much more in character with the grammar faux pas.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday April 10 2014, @12:33PM
"It feels like you should have kept with your broken english response that you are trying to correct."
A classic example of Muphry's law [wikipedia.org] right there... please rephrase that in English?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday April 10 2014, @02:13AM
Supplementing that with two observations:
- The genius of depicting a character with low but developed pupils and wide and high-arching in the whites is ambiguity - it could be interpreted as a character that is happy, or looking downward, or both. Your description of the mechanism of gaze angle applies much more to this [judychartrand.com] crude design, but becomes a bit more foggy when applied to the left side of this [huffpost.com] image, and the most notable difference in perceiving the two (as well as being a good indicator of ambiguity) is the amount of white under the pupil in proportion to the area and directional shape of the rest of the white portion (sclera). Try it yourself - duck directly below the first image, and see him still look below you, but when you duck to the lower left of the right-side character of the second image, he really does appear to look at you.
Assisting the perception of "lower angle", and compounding the illusion of gaze angle is the "tilt of the head," pictures in where one downward-looking eye is offset from another by height.
But the ultimate proof of the truth -- The most popular box of Cap'n Crunch here is on the adult shelf, and giving the bedroom eyes [huffpost.com] to your girlfriend.
" Hey, beautiful, forget about him, want a bowl?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 10 2014, @02:15AM
*belch* - meant the lower left of the left-side in the second image. Stupid ethanol.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 10 2014, @02:44AM
*belch* These [eclectikrelaxation.com] are the bedroom eyes. Be sure to mod me down for incompetence in future discussions.
(Score: 1) by codermotor on Thursday April 10 2014, @02:47AM
I think the two examples you give pretty much make my point. In the first, the character is alway looking down. No matter the viewing angle. In the second image, to me, the character is a bit cross-eyed. His right eye is not looking directly at the camera (and thus not at the viewer), but his left eye pretty much is looking at the viewer. The viewing angle does not change that: the left eye always looks at the viewer, the right eye never does (for me). So, because at least one eye is looking at the viewer, that's good enough for most people *, at least as far as images go.
I maybe should have pointed out in my original post that if the subject is looking directly into the camera, then no matter the viewing angle, the subject will always be perceived as looking directly at the viewer, and nowhere else. As a corollary, the the subject will never be perceived as looking at anyone other than the viewer.
I agree that creating the illusion of direct eye contact can be difficult, especially in non-photographic art, and is dependent on many factors.
* In real life, when a person's eyes don't coordinate well (I personally know of several people with this problem due to the affects of Cerebral Palsy), it can be difficult to know which eye is looking where, unless one asks (and it's not rude to do so).
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 10 2014, @06:27AM
Not that I trust the (reporting on) the research. The conclusions are so ambiguously-worded, it's not entirely certain that they've proved anything apart from a tautology. And/or they're reading something into the mean of a bimodal distribution, which is very bogus (the cereals will likely be on two different shelves, you'll look down at the bottom ones and look up at the higher ones). And they're conflating their bogosity together with other unconnected facts (such as those about eye contact) to try and make an issue out of it.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves