Celebrity EYE-Q: A tabletop game in which violations of holistic face schemas make faces look humorous

Didi Dunin¹, Colleen Macklin^1,2, Benjamin F. van Buren¹; ¹The New School, ²Parsons School of Design

Humor arises from violations of expectation. As a result, if visual expectations about a face are violated—e.g., if facial parts are incongruent with one another—it may appear humorous. Here we present insights from the design and validation of Celebrity EYE-Q, a tabletop game in which players learn about holistic face processing, and from controlled experiments formally testing whether violations of holistic face expectations cause faces to look humorous. In Celebrity EYE-Q, one player holds an image of a celebrity’s eyes over their own eyes while competitors attempt to identify the celebrity. Competitors experience interference from holistic face processing, automatically integrating the celebrity’s eyes with the player’s nose, mouth, etc. Playtesting suggested that celebrity eyes appear funnier when paired with mismatched facial features, particularly when gender cues conflict. Experiment 1 formally tested whether gender incongruity within a face increases perceived humorousness: participants completed a single-trial task in which they viewed two composite faces. The bottom half was randomly selected from among eight identities (four female, four male) and was identical across the pair. One composite paired this bottom half with a Same Gender top half, while the other paired it with a Different Gender top half. Participants indicated whether the Same Gender composite, the Different Gender composite, or neither looked funnier. Participants were strongly biased to select the Different Gender composite. Two control experiments confirmed that this effect depended on holistic face processing: Misaligning the face halves, or Inverting the displays (which also disrupts holistic visual processing of faces) substantially reduced the bias to select Different Gender composites as looking funnier. These findings show how violation of holistic visual expectations about faces contribute to impressions of humorousness, and demonstrate how Celebrity EYE-Q offers an engaging platform for teaching principles of holistic face processing through play.