Daniel Dennett has advanced the opinion that the evolutionary purpose of the cuteness response in humans is to make us respond positively to babies. This does seem plausible. Babies are pretty cute, after all. It's a tempting explanation.
Here is one of the cutest baby pictures I found on a Google search.
And this is a bunny.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the bunny is about 75,119 times cuter than the baby.
Now, bunnies are not evolutionarily important for humans to like and want to nurture. In fact, bunnies are edible. By rights, my evolutionary response to the bunny should be "mmm, needs a sprig of rosemary and thirty minutes on a spit". But instead, that bunny - and not the baby or any other baby I've seen - strikes the epicenter of my cuteness response, and being more baby-like along any dimension would not improve the bunny. It would not look better bald. It would not be improved with little round humanlike ears. It would not be more precious with thumbs, easier to love if it had no tail, more adorable if it were enlarged to weigh about seven pounds.
If "awwww" is a response designed to make me love human babies and everything else that makes me go "awwww" is a mere side effect of that engineered reaction, it is drastically misaimed. Other responses for which we have similar evolutionary psychology explanations don't seem badly targeted in this way. If they miss their supposed objects at all, at least it's not in most people. (Furries, for instance, exist, but they're not a common variation on human sexual interest - the most generally applicable superstimuli for sexiness look like at-least-superficially healthy, mature humans with prominent human sexual characteristics.) We've invested enough energy into transforming our food landscape that we can happily eat virtual poison, but that's a departure from the ancestral environment - bunnies? All natural, every whisker.1
It is embarrassingly easy to come up with evolutionary psychology stories to explain little segments of data and have it sound good to a surface understanding of how evolution works. Why are babies cute? They have to be, so we'll take care of them. And then someone with a slightly better cause and effect understanding turns it right-side-up, as Dennett has, and then it sounds really clever. You can have this entire conversation without mentioning bunnies (or kittens or jerboas or any other adorable thing). But by excluding those items from a discussion that is, ostensibly, about cuteness, you do not have a hypothesis that actually fits all of the data - only the data that seems relevant to the answer that presents itself immediately.
Evo-psych explanations are tempting even when they're cheaply wrong, because the knowledge you need to construct ones that sound good to the educated is itself not cheap at all. You have to know lots of stuff about what "motivates" evolutionary changes, reject group selection, understand that the brain is just an organ, dispel the illusion of little XML tags attached to objects in the world calling them "cute" or "pretty" or anything else - but you also have to account for a decent proportion of the facts to not be steering completely left of reality.
Humans are frickin' complicated beasties. It's a hard, hard job to model us in a way that says anything useful without contradicting information we have about ourselves. But that's no excuse for abandoning the task. What causes the cuteness response? Why is that bunny so outrageously adorable? Why are babies, well, pretty cute? I don't know - but I'm pretty sure it's not the cheap reason, because evolution doesn't want me to nurture bunnies. Inasmuch as it wants me to react to bunnies, it wants me to eat them, or at least be motivated to keep them away from my salad fixings.
1It is possible that the bunny depicted is a domestic specimen, but it doesn't look like it to me. In any event, I chose it for being a really great example; there are many decidedly wild animals that are also cuter than cute human babies.
Oh yes, very much so. But the brighter lenses, again, require non-smartphone cameras. (Not necessarily SLRs, of course.)
I wasn't, I promise.
Open all the time, yes. Continuously, not so much so far as I know. The processing is separate from the sensor, and there's a readout process that amounts to capturing an image from light falling on the sensor during a given period.[1] Hmm, if readout and reset are separate (which I think they generally are) then I suppose you can capture shorter "subframes" without disturbing the capture of a longer frame within which they occur. That was an error on my part, but it wasn't the result of assuming an SLR camera. I still worry that getting the information needed would require very short (and therefore noisy) subframes, and that that would interfere with accurate tracking. But I haven't done the obvious experiments to see what the images would be likely to look like.
I'm not sure why you're telling me this, since I already said exactly the same thing in the comment you were replying to, and the whole point of my proposal was to make use of the subject-motion-tracking already implemented for AF to enable the IS mechanism to compensate for subject motion.
Yes, though of course that fails if the subject's eyes happen not to be in shot, or if the subject is something without eyes, or if they're too small in the image to track well (if this turns out to be feasible, bird photographers will love it -- though possibly birds move too fast). AF can do pretty well at tracking subjects even if they don't have visible eyes; I assume this system would use essentially the same techniques. (Track whatever high-contrast features happen to be visible in the right places, I guess.)
Yes (that was my point about it being hopeless if the subject moves too much). But we're talking here (or at least I am) about movement within a single image-capture, and the point is simply to extend the range of acceptable exposure times. If a sharp image requires that your child not move more than a pixel or two, and if you have an IS system that can move the sensor by 100 pixels[2], and -- this is the tricky bit -- if this hypothetical system can predict the child's movement well enough -- then you can get a sharp image with an exposure 50x longer than without the system. In practice it would not be nearly that good, of course. (The same argument applies to the use of IS to mitigate hand movement, but even the best IS systems don't deliver a 6-stop improvement. And they have the advantage of being able to use accelerometers to measure how the camera is moving rather than depending on analysing previous image captures.) If we're talking about improvements of a stop or two, then the max displacement of the IS mechanism would probably not be the limiting factor.
[1] For "rolling-shutter" sensors, the relevant region in spacetime is "sheared" :-).
[2] I haven't looked hard for this information, but one thing found by desultory googling is that the sensor-shift IS on the (now some years old) Pentax K-7 SLR can move the sensor by about 1mm. The horizontal size of its sensor is about 24mm and 5000 pixels, so 1mm is about 200px.
Cameras with an electronic viewfinder have to update it with a reasonable refresh rate, if the AF is set to continuous it's updated in real time as long you half-press the shutter button, exposure/histogram is also updated in real time. The issue is basically how high a frequency can it do.
The key word is "predict". If you are confident of your prediction, you can do an exposure without measuring anything while it's in process.
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