NORWAY – Norwegian and Swedish psychologist and computer researchers have managed to achieve such possibility. They pieced together existing knowledge of infant’s vision with technology and mathematics to change images of adults making different facial expressions.

“By using mathematics we can deconstruct an image into sinusoidal gratings and then for each of those functions we can decrease the contrast of that specific frequency by using the same inverse mathematical process we go back to the image and then the image will be blurred in the same way as the as the sinusoidal grating were blurred,” said Olov Von Hofsten, researching in eclipse optics.

Adult volunteers were shown the images. They identified facial expressions in three courses of cases when viewed 30 cm away. The scores got increasingly worse when the pictures were viewed further away.

Professor Tim Brennen, University of Oslo, said: “30 centimeters if you think about it, is about a distance that a mother will hold a baby when breastfeeding or cuddling. And so we think it’s a quite an important distance evolutionary, quite an important distance for a baby to be picking up mother’s signals and so we think it’s not just by chance that the result were much better at 30 cm than 60 and 120.”

Olov Von Hofsten is developing an app that will enable parents to download photos and observe how their child is seeing them.

He said: “We take a lot of images today with our cameras and with our phones. Any of those images can be filtered in the same manner just to show what newborns see.”

For the longest time parent(s) have been confused as to how long it will take their newborn to mimic their expressions; sometimes even within hours of birth. Thanks to this research future parent(s) can get a special peek into the eyes of their child.

-source: Reuters