27 without mimicking expressions, 30 with -- which is probably a small enough spread to be explainable by chance.
Oddly, though, there's almost no overlap between the answers I got wrong: only one mistake appears on both lists. This might indicate that different reasoning pathways are being engaged, but a sample size of one is far from conclusive; did anyone else notice something similar going on?
Interestingly, I found the female eyes very difficult to read (they all look very similar, possibly because they're heavily made-up) but got most of them correct. I think the test might be kind of sexist though. Most of the women are flirtatious, interested, fantasising, etc.
It seems likely it's Autism Spectrum Disorders. Vaniver is probably referring to some of these discussions:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/559/autism_and_lesswrong/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/28w/aspergers_poll_results_lw_is_on_the_spectrum/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/28l/do_you_have_highfunctioning_aspergers_syndrome/
What the? I thought I failed epically. My score came in at 30. Apparently I'm good at reading eyes but under-confident. Or maybe just good at multiple choice tests.
I didn't redo the test with mimicking. Doing it once stretched my patience for black and white eye looking at. Doing the same test again would make the relevance of a score improvement to mimicking negligible anyway.
I had a very similar experience with the exercise, thinking that I was going to get little better than guessing randomly, but instead got 29. If the explanation for this is that (neurotypical) people intuitively have the ability to read facial expressions due to evolution, why are my/our confidence levels low?
Is... is it poor social skills making these skills rarely practiced? It could be, at least for me.Is... is it poor social skills making these skills rarely practiced?
Many (but not all) of the social difficulties associated with high functioning autistism can be attributed to a bias in attention. Going through life caring about the wrong things will leave you with a distorted skill base.
If the explanation for this is that (neurotypical) people intuitively have the ability to read facial expressions due to evolution, why are my/our confidence levels low?
I know my confidence in the read was tied to the feeling that I was being constrained. Normally I would have more to go on than just the tiny little slit where the eyes are.
Just did the test, and found it very hard not to mimic the facial expressions when doing it the first time... seems like my brain just instinctively wants to "try it out" to see what the expression means. However, I got a score of 29 the first time, and 27 the second time, when I allowed my face to do what it wanted to do.
Also: is this a perfect example of hindsight bias? Or is there actually something relevant in the fact that when I look back through the list to of answers I get wrong my reaction to most of them is "oh yeah, of course!".
Huh, got a fairly high score on this. On similar tests done by medical professionals I tend to get a much lower score, but on the other hand I have noticed increasing social skills due to practice since then. Interesting.
I seem to recall this site having a high population with some sort of Autism Spectrum Disorder, and so you might be interested in an online test of eye-reading ability, which seems to be linked to ASD.
But once you take it, just read your score and open the test up in a new tab- don't see which eyes you got wrong. Then retake the test, but imitate the photo each time, and then guess.
Does your score increase? Compare the lists of eyes you got wrong (the benefit of doing this in two tabs). Anything interesting?
From The Last Psychiatrist.