Overview
Earlier work on ageing cues, 3D acquisition, and image-based assessment of similarity and difference leads to questions about perception, decision-making, and confidence in visual judgements.
The page asks how visible features are perceived, weighted, and used for visual judgements.
From features to judgements
Visible cues become informative when they are recognisable under concrete image conditions, used by observers, and contribute to a stable judgement.
Morphological description therefore leads to a psychological question: how does visible information become a judgement about age, similarity, or image-based correspondence?
Visible ageing cues
Earlier work with 3D data of head and face addressed visible ageing cues, especially wrinkle, furrow, and line structures. This material remains important because ageing cues are visible, but not automatically unambiguous age cues.
This raises the question: which structures attract attention, which are weighted, and when does this lead to a shared or uncertain estimate of age?
Faces as a model of visual assessment
Faces provide many cues at once: shape, contour, skin texture, expression, hair features, image information, and context. This simultaneity brings the selection and weighting of visible information into focus.
Age judgements, similarity judgements, and same/different decisions are related forms of visual judgement. They differ in task, but share the same basic problem: visible information has to be translated into a constrained decision.
Research areas
- visual age perception and visible ageing cues
- facial comparison, similarity, and same/different decisions
- confidence, uncertainty, and metacognitive calibration
- observer variability, consensus, dissent, and repeatability
- image quality, view, and stimulus variation