Psychology and Brain News

How do we recognize a face? To date, most research has answered holistically: We look at all the features simultaneously and, perceiving the relationships among them, gain an advantage over taking in each feature individually.

Do baby-faced opponents have a better chance of gaining your trust? By subtly altering fictional politicians' faces, researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem examined whether minor changes in appearance can affect people's judgment about "enemy" politicians and their offer to make peace

Why are the faces of primates so dramatically different from one another? Biologists serving as "evolutionary detectives" studied the faces of 129 adult male primates from Central and South America, and offer answers.

In the 1970s, the roboticist Masahiro Mori noticed a curious phenomenon. As robots became more human-like, their appeal increased but only up to a point. When their human likeness became too realistic (but still not perfect), their appeal plunged.

One of these two images contains a hidden picture of a face. Which one? This was the question faced by participants in a remarkable psychology experiment just published, Measuring Internal Representations from Behavioral and Brain Data.

FFA may not only mediate human expertise in face recognition but, supporting the expertise hypothesis, may mediate the automatic holistic processing of any highly familiar multipart visual input.

How do we perceive someone we’ve only just met? How do we judge him, assign him to some sort of category in our mind, explain to ourselves what he is and what he is likely to be?