Why is an image of a face without features disturbing? Below is a snapshot of an article linked from LinkedIn today.

What I find more disturbing than the topic at hand is the featured image used to head up the article.

Clearly it's important to provide suitable images to match content.

But why is a face with no features so disturbing? 

Is facial recognition so deeply embedded into our subconscious that the inability to distinguish any features alerts us in some way? 

Is it the deepest ravine of the uncanny valley?





Or is it just me? I mean it's not me obviously, in the image... is it just me that finds it disturbing?
It's from fear sprung out of the inability to clearly identify and interpret something and from that know how to react to it.

There's something skewed with what you see, something deviating from your mental model of what a face (in this example) looks like. That makes us perceive it as something unknown, and what's unknown is also perceived as unpredictable and induces an uneasiness and discomfort.

The reason why this is unpleasant:



But this isn't:



Is because the latter is clearly an illustration and can be subconsciously dismissed as something static/dead, and by that predictable and nonthreatening. In the first image we have a hard time identifying what it is we see, whether it's something that's alive or if it's dead. This makes us uncomfortable since we don't know how we should react to it, even if it's just an image. 

Being confronted by it in real life would without a doubt be very disturbing since then there is no escape, it's very real, very unknown and therefore very unpredictable.