Believe it or not, one thing that predicts how well a CEO’s company performs is – the width of his face! CEOs with wider faces, like Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines, have better-performing companies than CEOs like Dick Fuld, the long-faced final CEO of Lehman Brothers. That’s More
How do we recognize a face? Do we pick out “local” features— an eye or a mouth— and extrapolate from there? Or do we take in the “global” configuration—facial structure, distance between the features—at once? Now, a group of psychologists— Sébastien Miellet and Philippe G. Schyns at the University of More
The phenomenon known as holistic processing is best known in faces. Most people see faces as a whole, not as two eyes a nose, and a mouth. But holistic processing happens in other cases, too, and can even be taught. One possible explanation is that holistic processing emerges from expertise More
Hierarchical Encoding in Visual Working Memory: Ensemble Statistics Bias Memory for Individual Items Timothy F. Brady and George A. Alvarez Current models of visual working memory assume that people encode memories of objects individually. Yet, new research has shown that items surrounding an object can influence a person’s recollection of More
I spent about an hour yesterday at the National Gallery of Art, mesmerized by the Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s paintings of human faces. They are not realistic depictions of faces, though some were meant as portraits of public figures. They are instead composites of familiar objects like flowers, fruit or More
Our ability to recognize faces is something we take for granted, but it is actually quite an extraordinary talent, considering the thousands of people we can instantly identify, ranging from our parents to “the guy who was in a few episodes of that TV show I like.” The structures in More
