Eye centring in selfies posted on Instagram

Nicola Bruno, Marco Bertamini and Christopher W Tyler

PLOS ONE, 2019, vol. 14, issue 7, 1-9

Abstract: Earlier work by one of us examined a historical corpus of portraits and found that artists often paint the subject such that one eye is centred horizontally. If due to psychological mechanisms constraining artistic composition, this eye-centring bias should be detectable also in portraits by non-professionals. However, this finding has been questioned both on theoretical and empirical grounds. Here we tested eye-centring in a larger (N ~ = 4000) and more representative set of selfies spontaneously posted on Instagram from six world cities. In contrast with previous selfie results, the distribution of the most-centred eye position peaked almost exactly at the horizontal centre of the image and was statistically different from predictions based on realistic Monte-Carlo predictions. In addition, we observed a small but statistically reliable pseudoneglect effect as well as a preference for centring the left-eye. An eye-centring tendency appears to exist in self-portraits by non-artists.

Date: 2019
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0218663

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0218663

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