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Comment by PavlikPaja | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how is the lack of this effect connected to autism.

I wonder about this as well. That example on Wikipedia had no effect on me. On the other hand could it be the advertising industry using it too much and some people getting "anesthetized" to it? I don't think it's autism for me because generally I'm hyper aware of people's emotions.

I came to the comments specifically to make a similar point and was glad to see people already addressing it. I (diagnosed ASD) watched the video on Wikipedia and thought it was weird he had the same neutral expression each time.

There's his expression in clip A, and the following subject in clip B. The viewer's impression of his social calibration (his appropriateness) in A changes after they see B.

A is a neutral expression.

B is a somber event where restraint is required: A is appropriate.

B is a happy event or perhaps a close family member: A then B implies he's cold, underwhelmed or disapproving.

B is some random, inanimate object: B holds no new social meaning of A, unless B is symbolic or a plot Macguffin.

It's the same A, but it's the clip B following it that rewrites socioemotional history of the viewer.

At a higher level of abstraction, it and other socioemotional back-rationalizations imply most people allow the future to rewrite their impression of the past, making the past not entirely cast in stone. People can easily turn on each other and then forget about it simply because they choose to rewrite history in their minds, twice.

Like commercials, I don't think it works when you watch with suspicion. So you cannot watch this movie and draw conclusions from it because you're focussed on the context of the Kuleshov effect (which also makes it more difficult to replicate). Even movies are different when you watch them critically.

(FWIW, I have ASD as well, and for me the expressions on his face are meaningless.)

Apparently the study could be replicated (with a neutral expression as shown in the example). Given that, I think it's unlikely that anyone is unaffected.

I have two hypotheses:

a) It may be a kind of hindsight bias. You watched the video in the context of an article on the Kuleshov effect and knew it was the same neutral expression each time.

b) You cannot gage the mood of the embedded scene and thus cannot transfer it onto the encasing scene. The end result is that you are not affected in this instance. But it would not be because of some immunity to the Kuleshov effect itself.

I don't have autism (or at least I'm not diagnosed) and none of the faces evoked any effect on me. But maybe it is because I'm fixated on the faces and not on the bigger picture.

A variant of this is used in an autism test:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6577486

https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/well-quiz-the-mind...

Autism's partial face-blindness may include an inability to learn prejudices about the emotional content of faces.

It's difficult to say precisely. Someone with classic autism most likely wouldn't be able to interpret the implications of Hitchcock edit sequences because it would require Theory of Mind and social inference. Aspergers would likely have a better chance, but it might not be innately, immediately obvious to them.

In a neurotypical person the "GPU" of the brain is used for face and body language recognition. I like to think the "GPU" is used for other things when you fit the AS - it seems logical that when using different circuitry for the task you will hit different illusions (different biases in the algorithm).

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