A not-blurry photo of that classic Psych Dalmatian Doggy?

August 2, 2020 6:28 PM

Many undergrad Psychology textbooks have a blurry high-contrast photo of a Dalmatian dog sniffing in the snow. Google image search results are just variations on the image. Is there a more "original" image of that particular photograph that is not doctored so high-contrasted, which is viewable on internets? To make a comparison to the high-contrast version?

This is in regards to a discussion about cognition, not a bet but kinda.

**please don't tell me how to see the snow doggie, I see it**

(Dalmatians are good dogs, share pics if you like)

posted by ovvl to Education (6 answers total)

Best answer: This is reportedly the first publication of the image (in Life Magazine). It looks sharper and you should be able to zoom in on details as well.
posted by Tiny Bungalow at 6:45 PM on August 2, 2020 [7 favorites]

When you mentioned that photo I remembered it from my own psychology text book from back in the 80s.

The photo credits in the edition of Life posted above led me to this page which credits the photo to photographer R.C James.

It would appear that the photo appeared in Life in 1965 and that James' photo was then picked by by the 1970 book "The Intelligent Eye" - an academic book which would have made it familiar to researchers in visual perception. It seems to have remained known there since then.

What became of the dog - Woody, we don't know; hope he didn't get lost.
posted by rongorongo at 4:19 AM on August 3, 2020

(And here is somebody who was asking he same question about the photo back in 2012) - the author also notes that the academic textbook seems to be a crop of the original.
posted by rongorongo at 4:36 AM on August 3, 2020

Does the image have to be the original Dalmatian? Mooney face (or Mooney images or Mooney stimuli, etc.) is the term for the general class of ambiguous, black and white images that rely on closure, and there are many people that work on this topic. For example, young children are not able to see the Dalmatian (or the Mooney face). People have developed galleries of Mooney images to be used as stimuli in psychology experiments, which may be relevant to you.

Looks like this is the original article on Mooney stimuli:
Mooney & Ferguson. (1951). A new closure test. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 8, pp. 51-60.

MeMail me if you'd like a PDF.

Here is more modern work, from a quick Google search:

Caspar M. Schwiedrzik, Lucia Melloni and Schurger. (2018). Mooney face stimuli for visual perception research.
Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, Basri and Boaz Nadler. (2008). 3D Shape Reconstruction of Mooney Faces.

Disclaimer: I work in an adjacent field, but claim no expertise on this topic. I do not know any of the authors or papers above.
posted by tickingclock at 5:38 AM on August 3, 2020

Sorry, to clarify: different researchers have constructed Mooney images out of greyscale images in order to create a nice database of stimuli to use. If you contact the researchers and ask them nicely, they might be willing to share the greyscale images and the final Mooney images with you. That is, if you are interested in images other than the Dalmatian.
posted by tickingclock at 6:07 AM on August 3, 2020

Sorry, last comment, I promise. This one also looks relevant:

Ke, Yu and Whitney. (2017). Mooney Face Classification and Prediction by Learning Across Tone.

See Fig. 3 for some examples.
posted by tickingclock at 7:02 AM on August 3, 2020 [1 favorite]