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
You stop at a shop window and wonder why someone inside is blatantly staring at you — until you realize that person is you. Scenarios like this are impossible for most of us to imagine, but quite common for sufferers of acquired prosopagnosia (AP), a condition hindering the ability to More
Angry words and gestures are not the only way to get a sense of how temperamental a person is. According to new findings in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, a quick glance at someone’s facial structure may be enough for us to predict their tendency More
