I'm amazed the message their eyes sent was so clear and nuanced.
When humans see a face, we apparently focus on the eyes and the lips. Once, for a summer job, I worked with our school photographer retouching the scanned images of the incoming freshman class. For efficiency, we just blurred the images to obliterate any scanning errors, and then restored and hand-retouched only the eyes and lips. Subjectively, the difference between blurred and blurred-with-original-eyes-and-lips wa…
Yup, and this "built-in" face-reading circuitry can go wrong in interesting ways: