Giovanni Perillo

Art of Displacement Giovanni Perillo

The heterogeneity of behaviors and interpretations sometimes drives our memory, as shown in Memorization of faces, associated with professions and characters. The aim of this research is to measure the influence of dominant social behavior model oriented towards a functional purpose, tied to a pre-defined, conventional, stereotyped model of reality based on the memorization of 7 photographed faces associated with professions. At the same time, we also wanted to measure how much the failure of memorizing the same faces linked to personality traits could have been attributable to a behavior oriented towards an aesthetic-explorative purpose. The subconscious prediction of the perceivers of interaction with the photos (or the individual portrayed in the photo) could have generated an imaginative projection. The prediction might have pushed the perceiver to subconsciously produce hypotheses on those faces thus entailing, but we should perhaps say different, registration of the information to be memorized. The memorization of faces-professions produces 84% of correct associations while the memorization of faces-personality traits produced about 55% of correct associations and a specific heterogeneity of the incorrect answers. The relevant number of incorrect answers in the case of personality traits and in particular their high heterogeneity shows how each person sees something singular in the portrayed faces, different from other individuals, not answering functionally to the requested performance.