A New “Fat Face” Illusion

We report a novel fat face illusion that when two identical images of the same face are aligned vertically, the face at the bottom appears ‘fatter’. This illusion emerged when the faces were shown upright, but not inverted, with the size of the illusion being 4%. When the faces were presented upside down, the illusion did not emerge. Also, when upright clocks were shown in the same vertically aligned fashion, we did not observe the illusion, indicating that the fat illusion does not generalize to every category of canonically upright objects with similar geometric shape as a face.

A New “Fat Face” Illusion Journal Articles