A research paper authored and led by Assistant Professor Ryuhei Ueda has been published in Perception, an international journal in the field of psychology.

This study was conducted in collaboration with researchers specializing in art history as part of an ongoing joint research project. It involved an online survey focusing on the Portrait Scroll of Court Nobles (Kuge Retsueizu), a Kamakura-period illustrated scroll housed in the Kyoto National Museum that features realistic depictions of 57 court nobles from that era. In the experiment, participants were presented with 13 facial impressions sampled from the scroll and asked to rate them on a variety of personal traits.

The results revealed a structural pattern of impressions that closely resembled those observed when using photographs of real, contemporary faces. These findings suggest that we tend to form impressions of facial expressions drawn in old historical artworks using similar criteria as those used for real modern faces.

Reference:

Ueda, R., Suzuki, A., Takagishi, A., Suzuki, C., & Nagai, K. (2025). Trait judgments of medieval Japanese illustrated portraits. Perception, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/03010066251322632