Faces are central to art and cognition. In visual arts, faces are represented in very different ways, depending on the artist, the artistic movement or the art period. Some portraits depict human faces in a realistic way, but often faces are represented as sketches, caricatures or with abstract features. Paulo Ventura and collaborators investigated if the same processing mechanisms underlie our perception of real faces (photographs) and faces across different art styles. They specifically explored the degree to which faces in paintings are processed holistically as faces in photographs are.
Discover more about this research here. To read the paper and appreciate some artwork from the renaissance to cubism, go to:
Ventura, P., Liu, T. T., Cruz, F., Pereira, A., Domingues, M., Guerreiro, J. C., & Delgado, J. (2023). From Perugino to Picasso: holistic processing of faces in paintings. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/aca0000575
