Photos as Visual Clues in User Interfaces

Our minds are very good at recognizing subtle changes in visual content. Take a website that you visit on a regular basis. They change a color or font size and you take notice. I'm not talking about the recent Facebook layout changes. No, I'm referring to small changes. This effect is more pronounced on sites with basic content and not a lot of glitz.

My recent experience with this has been with Twitter. It is not a change in their design but rather with the profile pictures of people I'm following. Robert Scoble recently made his profile green and Hulk-like. This made it stand out but I still knew it was him. The visual clue that I was alerted to deals with our brain's facial recognition system. I am following two people who have similar pictures. Blue background, white shirt and both male. See below:
1)

2)

Every time I see a tweet from these two gentlemen I need to look at the Twitter name to confirm the source. In the setting above they don't look that similar, even to me, but imagine the Twitter layout with many images and rapidly scrolling through the list to find something interesting. If it only occurred once I could ignore it but it seems to happen every time I come across their images.

Two events this week caused me to focus on this topic. One was an episode of Hak5 that had a segment on a facial recognition application for Facebook the other was the presentation on Artificial Life by Larry Yaeger at the Chicago ACM meeting. Our brains can make the same mistakes in recognizing images that computers do when not presented with enough data, context or time to complete the analysis.

Slightly off topic but this is a ramble. David Byrne of Talking Heads fame has a book/DVD, Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information, which explores using PowerPoint in ways you've never seen before.

This brings me to the lyric, "I've changed my hairstyle so many times now" from Life During Wartime, Talking Heads. Does anyone have a class to train men to recognize a change in their significant other's hairstyle? I'd pay for that one, because I've already paid.