Bouba-Kiki effect
Hi! Today the theme is the bouba-kiki effect.
The bouba / kiki effect was discovered by the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in 1929. In his experiments carried out on the island of Tenerife, where Spanish is the primary language, Köhler showed forms similar to those of the image showed below to a series of subjects, and found a strong preference to associate the pointed form with the name "takete" and rounded with the name "baluba" In the year 2001, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard repeated the experiment using the words "kiki" and "bouba" and asked a large number of subjects "which of these forms is bouba and which is kiki?" In these experiments conducted with both English and Tamil speakers, 95% to 98% chose the rounded shape as bouba and the pointy as kiki, suggesting that the human brain somehow extracts abstract properties from shapes and sounds. A recent work by Daphne Maurer et al. has shown that even children 2 and a half years old (too young to read) show this effect.
The bouba / kiki effect was discovered by the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in 1929. In his experiments carried out on the island of Tenerife, where Spanish is the primary language, Köhler showed forms similar to those of the image showed below to a series of subjects, and found a strong preference to associate the pointed form with the name "takete" and rounded with the name "baluba" In the year 2001, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard repeated the experiment using the words "kiki" and "bouba" and asked a large number of subjects "which of these forms is bouba and which is kiki?" In these experiments conducted with both English and Tamil speakers, 95% to 98% chose the rounded shape as bouba and the pointy as kiki, suggesting that the human brain somehow extracts abstract properties from shapes and sounds. A recent work by Daphne Maurer et al. has shown that even children 2 and a half years old (too young to read) show this effect.
How does the cinema use this effect?
Squares, circles, triangles ... The most basic forms we teach babies are also one of the favorite tools of filmmakers to manipulate our emotions when we look at the big screen. This is especially easy to see in animated films.
The human brain extracts abstract concepts from forms and sounds even if they are not there. It is such a settled behavior that it has even a scientific name: the Bouba-Kiki effect.
This video of Now You See It makes a review for the use of that same effect in the cinema, especially in the animation. Angular forms, for example, are used to define villains even though they are not yet presented as such. The friendly characters, however, are always combinations of rounded shapes. Disney's quintessential child character, Mickey Mouse, can be reduced to three circles.
The squares, on the other hand, represent stable forms, sometimes boring or stubborn, but also strong. Great characters like the protagonist of Up or Ira, from Inside Out respond to this description. These forms are used even outside the children's cinema, although in a much more subtle way.
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