Grotesque Animals

Grotesque in Dickens

Grotesque Impressions Enhance the Gaze Cueing Effect

A non-predictive gaze cue produces a reflexive shift of attention to the gazed-at location. The present study used a modified version of Posner's attentional cueing paradigm (a gaze cueing paradigm) to investigate role of grotesque facial expressions on a gaze cueing effect involving induced fear. Grotesque faces were created by vertically shifting the position of one of the two eyes (Experimen...

The Carnivalesque and the Grotesque in Elizabeth Bishop's Poetry

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was a Pulitzer-prize winning American poet who did not produce much published work in her career. This was partly due to her low confidence, depression, alcoholism, and difficult personal life, but it was also due to her meticulousness as a poet. Colleagues and critics praised her strong description and mastery of technique, but criticized her early work as lacking ...

Discriminating Grotesque from Typical Faces: Evidence from the Thatcher Illusion

The discrimination of thatcherized faces from typical faces was explored in two simultaneous alternative forced choice tasks. Reaction times (RTs) and errors were measured in a behavioural task. Brain activation was measured in an equivalent fMRI task. In both tasks, participants were tested with upright and inverted faces. Participants were also tested on churches in the behavioural task. The ...

Flashed face distortion effect: grotesque faces from relative spaces.

We describe a novel face distortion effect resulting from the fast-paced presentation of eye-aligned faces. When cycling through the faces on a computer screen, each face seems to become a caricature of itself and some faces appear highly deformed, even grotesque. The degree of distortion is greatest for faces that deviate from the others in the set on a particular dimension (eg if a person has...