Experiencing awareness of other persons, such as in typical communication among friends and family. A primary source of value in communications.
Faces, particularly eyes, naturally attract human attention. One aspect of the biological machine of faciality is eye structure. Compared to other primates, humans have more salient eyes: the human eye lacks certain pigments found in primate eyes, so the outer fibrous covering, or “sclera,” of our eyeball is white. In contrast, most primates have uniformly … Continue reading “whites of their eyes” video quality test
A lot of interesting thinking and experiments are now going on concerning presence in communication. Mike Gotta’s post entitled “Presence: Complex, Pervasive And Evasive” highlights the business case for presence. Which industry structure do you think is better for private investment, competition among many firms, and innovation: an industry in which firms compete to supply … Continue reading presence in communication services
Primate neural systems process gaze relatively well. Infant chimpanzees aged 10-32 weeks prefer photographs of human faces with eyes open compared to photographs with eyes shut, and with direct gaze compared to averted gaze. By four months of age, human infants can discriminate between faces with direct and averted gaze. In adult humans, direct gaze … Continue reading cross-species evidence on presence
The evocatively named “mirror neurons” have recently been attracting much discussion in the blogsphere. Mirror neurons seemed to be associated with hightened affective states and hyper-speculation in humans. But they are not the only neurons with these properties. As early as 1993, two scientists found that a particular neuron in a cat’s brain responded to … Continue reading mirrors and making sense of another like oneself
Brain effects are communicative goods. A recent study found common effects among reading and seeing actions: Participants observed actions and read phrases relating to foot, hand, or mouth actions. In the premotor cortex of the left hemisphere, a clear congruence was found between effector-specific activations of visually presented actions and of actions described by literal … Continue reading more empirical evidence on making sense