8 ms·
Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (Do You Have Asperger's?)
- BoppreH 16y agoPeople who made the test software, please, please, don't resize my browser, send my info without telling me or redirecting to the site that built the test. Other than that, I enjoyed the test. Simple, quick, painless and intriguing. I'm intrigued, can you see? 29 point something. I was expecting a lot less.
- aruvam 16y agoMy feelings exactly. Got 29 points - in the ones that I got incorrect, it was usually the alternate that I had narrowed it down to that was the right one.
- vessenes 16y agoI found that test extremely stressful, although I was on track for 33 / 36 when I stopped. Intriguing! Other HN'ers -- did you find it stress-inducing? The first Turing test I've gotten nervous doing.
- colanderman 16y agoYes, I quit after a few questions (of which I had ~50% correct). I found it mentally taxing.
- msbarnett 16y agoI found it a bit irritating because some of the pictures were incredibly grainy, but not stressful per se. (scored a 32, for the record)
- shib71 16y ago33, which surprised me as I'm extremely introverted. I got the sense that the expressions fell into different categories based on where the tension around the eyes was, and the matching word had been randomly chosen from the category. The "1000 yard stare" category, the "happy" category, and so on. By the end I was enjoying this new match-the-category puzzle.
- PixelRobot 16y agoI'm also extremely introverted, and I got a 34. Asperger's and introversion are very different. A lot of people get Asperger's, introversion and shyness mixed, but they are three completely different things.
- newobj 16y agoThe people I know with Asperger's are anything BUT introverted or shy. They overshare. They overtalk. They're oblivious to social norms. Shyness and introversion, if anything, to me, seem like an oversensitivity to social norms.
- PixelRobot 16y agoWell, you're more likely to know the sociable people with Asperger's than the antisocial ones, right? What you describe is not the case with all the people who have Asperger's. Some avoid social interaction because they know they don't understand the norms and prefer to avoid potential conflicts. You can't make a generalization there. Shyness is all about anxiety about social interaction. Oversensitivity to social norms can cause it, yes, but also bad experiences or low self-esteem. Introversion/Extroversion is about where you focus your mind. Introverted people are more focused on their own thoughts and mental processes, and extroverted people are more focused on interacting with the mental processes of other people. If something, introversion would imply caring less about social interaction and social norms, not oversensitivity. That doesn't mean introverted people don't care or follow social norms, or that they're not sociable. They just need more time with their own thoughts and feel less stimulated by petty social interaction like small talk. That doesn't mean introverted people are not sociable. Some introverts are very sociable and good at conversations, because they try to make their conversations interesting and stimulating. Some other are not interested in being sociable at all.
- cb33 16y agoI got just about average (26) but I would be interested to see if HN has an inordinate amount of people coming in around the low 20's.
- endlessvoid94 16y agoI also got a 26. Apparently I'm not as good at reading people as I thought...
- ratsbane 16y agoAlso 26. The average on HN seems a bit higher. I wonder if there's some selection bias towards reporting higher answers.
- msbarnett 16y agoQuite possibly. The test is also long enough that I probably would have bailed out long before finishing if I had felt I wasn't doing well enough to be curious about the end result.
- sp332 16y ago25 - "average" but I'm sure there will be reporting bias in HN comments.
- amadiver 16y agoI'm amazed the message their eyes sent was so clear and nuanced.
- slyn 16y agoIndeed. I only got a 31, but with the exception of one set of eyes that I completely misread each one I got wrong I was waffling between two answers and the one I didn't pick was the actual correct answer.
- rlpb 16y agoReally? I didn't feel that at all, although I did get an above-average score in the end. I felt I could name an emotion with most images, but I found it hard to select an appropriate match from the choices given and was often not satisfied with my answer. Some images I could not read at all.
- lmkg 16y agoWhen humans see a face, we apparently focus on the eyes and the lips. Once, for a summer job, I worked with our school photographer retouching the scanned images of the incoming freshman class. For efficiency, we just blurred the images to obliterate any scanning errors, and then restored and hand-retouched only the eyes and lips. Subjectively, the difference between blurred and blurred-with-original-eyes-and-lips was astonishing, while the difference between original and BWOEAL was comparatively rather small. I would assume that human expression and human vision evolved in parallel, in a complimentary fashion. This also explains why humans so easily find faces in inanimate objects, or in three-character sequences like :-) and ^_^. We're just highly tuned to recognize and parse very particular physical features.
- jey 16y agoYup, and this "built-in" face-reading circuitry can go wrong in interesting ways: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatcher_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatcher_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia
- tcskeptic 16y ago34/36 I did not find it stressful. I think that was because of the instant feedback, though if I had been getting questions wrong, that would have made things much worse than just finding out at the end.
- silvertab 16y agoSame here (34/36)... I was kinda surprised because I felt some of them were really wild guesses and it usually turned out I guessed correctly...
- alex_c 16y agoSame... and I was only way off on one of them. Not stressful, although I was getting impatient cause I should be working instead :p
- jdietrich 16y agoPrediction: The average HNer will score significantly higher than the general average. I hypothesise that the social issues geeks experience are predominantly caused by hypersensitivity to the emotions of others, rather than insensitivity; In keeping with the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis we tend to underestimate our ability to empathise, thereby causing us to overanalyse social situations, leading to anxiety and paralysis.
- dageshi 16y agoSpot on. 30 out of 36.
- david55475 16y ago35 out of 36. I've often thought I was hypersensitive about things/people, and I'm always concerned with what other people are feeling, even more than my (female) partner :)
- brettnak 16y ago31... Agreed.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- pg 16y agoWhat is the general average? I didn't make it far enough to get told what the scores mean.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- msbarnett 16y agoThe general population average is 26.2, and the Aspergers/High-Functioning Autist average is 21.9 according to the end of the test.
- katovatzschyn 16y ago
- wtracy 16y agoFor the first half of the test, I was kicking myself over the number I got wrong, but my final score placed me as above average. Actually, after I started mousing over the images to see full-size, and spending several seconds studying each face, I was almost always correct. Yay for me.
- rue 16y agoI think I did "better" with the small images, the large ones leading to overanalysis perhaps?
- klinquist 16y ago31 here.
- jhrobert 16y ago26
- makmanalp 16y agoIs it only me who finds it difficult to label expressions just in eyes, when it feels like an image of the overall face would be much clearer?
- m-photonic 16y agoI think that's rather the point of the test.
- makmanalp 16y agoWhile it's possible that I do have Asperger's (and I'd be interested to know if I did), I'm not sure how this properly tests anything. I know that Asperger's is sometimes characterised by a lack of understanding of social nuances and non-verbal expression, but how often do people have to react to only eyes as opposed to all facial expressions, supported by body language and words?
- csbutler 16y agoI'd like to know that too. I got 28. The ones I got wrong I'm sure I got wrong because I started to think about it. I'd wonder if the person was smiling for example. When I didn't think about it, And trusted my instincts and feelings instead. I always got it right. And figured it out almost instantly. But logically I can't explain that. It was like magic.
- mzl 16y agoI got 30 right, but with the exact opposite experience. The 6 I got wrong were the ones I did immediately, and the 30 I got right were the ones I thought about.
- m-photonic 16y ago>how often do people have to react to only eyes as opposed to all facial expressions, supported by body language and words? Not often, but supplying only the eyes is a good way to bring the scores down into a more useful range for the test. Assuming that eye-specific recognition ability is a close enough proxy for overall ability, of course. Personally I don't think this test has anything to do with Asperger's. My feeling is that facial recognition is to some extent an acquired skill like anything else, and that the lowest scores are largely going to go to the people with the least experience in attending to the emotions of others.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- rue 16y ago27. Not really stressful. I chose overly negative options in a couple cases and thought it might be showing a self-esteem pattern but subsequently I noticed that I misjudged the assertive ones (I think selecting a "interested"-type option instead). I dunno what, if anything, that indicates.
- sliceof314 16y ago23 here, i'm off to watch jeopardy at 5 o'clock! and then it's judge Wapner...
- jessewmc 16y ago33/36. Found it stressful. I felt like I was picking the desired answer, not reading an actual emotion. An artifact of the test maybe. The expressions read artificial to me--like pictures of actors or models. Not sure what that says.
- m-photonic 16y agoIt would be nice if they'd tell us the standard deviation in addition to the averages. I got 19, which puts me below the mean for the Asperger/HFA population, but I'm fairly sure I'm not in that category. Really, the two averages are barely more than four points apart, which is a rather modest interval compared to the range of scores that's been reported in this thread so far. Edit: It'd also be cool if they gave us more data than just the total number correct. Like, which emotions was I the best at recognizing? How well did I do with male faces as compared with female faces? Etc.
- rprospero 16y agoI'm also a little curious about the gender data from a different perspective. I don't know whether the eyes were randomized, but, when I took the test, all of the "romantic" emotions (e.g. flirtatious) in the test were displayed with female eyes. If that's the same way for everyone, I can't help but think that that would skew the results.
- blahblahblah 16y agoI found it interesting that, of the faces that I misidentified, all but one of them was female. It would be interesting to know if the statistics point to a significant difference in performance depending on the gender of the participant and the gender of the person's face being viewed. I got a 29 overall.
- muloka 16y ago23 over here. Of the ones I did get the majority were calculated guesses. I would have scored a lot lower if it wasn't multiple choice... or as my roommate pointed out if there was a fifth option: None of the above.
- tremendo 16y ago31. The only stress was that at a point I was alarmed because I felt I was misreading too many.
- glhaynes 16y agoAs always, it should be noted that it seems likely that people who got high scores would be more likely to post theirs (few people like to show off as below-average!), which is one reason taking an average of the scores posted on this page isn't indicative of an HN average score. (Me, I got 26. They don't call me Mr. Average for nothin'.) EDIT: If I'd gotten 25, do you think I'd have included that last line?
- Nogwater 16y ago26 here too. I felt like on some of them I would project a choice onto the eyes. Some where easy (only one choice made sense), and some seemed completely arbitrary.
- JoshCole 16y agoI've been diagnosed with apsergers and got a 32, nice!
- lotharbot 16y agoAlso a 32 here, and (at least when it comes to reading social cues) I've got all of the classic Aspergers symptoms. For example, my wife had to train me to make eye contact during conversation. I think that training boosted my score a lot. You might say I've studied for this test...
- mickdarling 16y ago30 with several of the wrong answers being my 50/50 choices with the actual correct answer. Nearly all of the ones I got correct, I was instantly certain. One, I think "ashamed", looked just like the expression on a character in a TV show, SGU colonel young, and I realized he nails the mood perfectly.
- spazz 16y agoAh 26, always a bit disappointing when you get the average score. One issue for me was that since english is not my native language I had to look up quite a few of the words describing different emotions. Even so I was actually a bit amazed by my own ability to read the different emotions quite quickly since I'm worthless at reading people in real life.
- dgordon 16y ago22...I think I got five or six wrong by second-guessing my first instinct.
- dahjelle 16y agoDoes anyone else feel like the questions were strangely distributed? I'm not exactly sure why. I guess I would have expected many more suspicious or confused faces, and I don't think I found very many. (Ended up with a 27.) I also saw the word "puzzled" as a potential answer, but I don't remember choosing it as an option. For that matter, puzzled seems like an emotion in which one would rarely see the subject's eyes. Or is this perhaps a part of the test, in which is is intentionally testing a subset of possible emotions rather than a wide gamut?
- bradfordw 16y ago21/36 - high functioning autism. Should I go see someone about this perhaps? Weird.
- philh 16y agoAs someone else points out, without standard deviations it's hard to know how indicative this score is. I got 23, which is consistent with previous tests I've taken (on which I score somewhere between "autistic" and "not autistic"). For some of them I felt like I was doing it "in software", using rules that I know consciously instead of intuitively recognising the emotion. But I don't know to what extent that's actually true (or if it's even a particularly meaningful distinction). I definitely felt like I had an easier time with some emotions than others. That's not surprising, but it would be interesting to see statistics for each individual face.
- SageRaven 16y agoI scored 29. Not stressful, but kinda odd all the same.
- Eddk 16y ago31
- rleisti 16y agoI got 21. I have a feeling that if I took this test a bunch of times (with different faces) that I'd probably get better at it.
- dp7531 16y ago19. I thought the test was a joke until my wife took it and got 31.
- rograndom 16y agoI have aspergers, but I got 30. Strange. The ones I had difficultly with were the "flirty" female ones. But then again, I've been working on "hacking" by aspergers for past few years, working from the ground up to figure out wtf facial expressions mean among other things.
- duckrank 16y agoI got a 24. As someone diagnosed with Asperger's Spectrum Disorder (Nonverbal Learning Disorder to be exact), this surprised me. I expected it to be lower. Granted, I've done some reading up on facial expressions so that might have helped. @makmanalp asked a very good question about why they tested only looking at the eyes and not the res of the face, or the rest of the body. While looking at the rest of the face would have been helpful, much of the way we express ourselves is done just in our eyes. Psychologist Daniel Goleman in his book "Social Intelligence" says that the eyes are, "...something akin to the poetic idea that the eyes are windows on the soul: the eyes offer glimpses into a person’s most private feelings. More specifically the eyes contain nerve projections that lead directly… neuron to neuron, [to] three major regions of the brain: the cortex (or “thinking brain”), the amygdala (the trigger point for many emotional reactions), and the brain stem (the “reptilian” zones for automatic response) (63-64)." I highly recommend Paul Ekman's "Emotions Revealed" if you're interested in this sort of thing. It's about reading facial micro-expressions - not about Asperger's. I recomend Goleman's books as well, but you'll probably find Ekman's more interesting. I've done quite a bit of personal research on this stuff, and while I'm no expert I'd be happy to try and answer any questions that people have.