Artistic Portraits of Strange-Face Illusions Produced through Eye-to-Eye Gazing in Dyads or Mirror-Gazing

Strange-face illusions are apparitional perceptions of deformed faces, unknown people and monstrous beings – that are produced when staring for a long time at one’s own face reflected in a mirror or when eye-to-eye staring at another person in a dyad, at low level room illumination. In this experiment, portrait artists were invited to draw strange-face illusions they perceived during a 10-minute session of eye-to-eye gazing while paired in dyads with naïve participants. Dissociation was measured through standard self-report questionnaires. Results showed that portraits became more abstract and less figurative as the artists experienced higher levels of non-pathological dissociation. Statistically, a significant correlation was found between art-abstraction ratings and dissociation scores by judges and portrait artists, respectively. Findings are discussed in relationship to modern art portraits à la manière de Scipione and Francis Bacon.