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Melissa Sayer, a resident of Westfield, N.J., was dying to get an iPad. However, she couldn't justify the expense of a gadget she didn't really need, no matter how "cool" it was.
Then, in August, a friend told Sayer she should consider selling her gold jewelry.
"The price of gold was high, my friend said, and since I never wear gold—I prefer funky silver jewelry—I thought, 'let's just see what happens,'" she says.
She picked out some necklaces and a pin she hadn't worn for over 10 years, threw in her high school class ring for good measure, and went down to a local jewelry store that was purchasing gold.
"[The store] bought my gold and gave me enough money to buy an iPad and a bunch of apps," Sayer says. "I was thrilled—I felt like I got a great deal."
Scores of people the world over who, like Sayer, have cashed in on the high gold prices, have no doubt felt the same way. Whether it's about selling gold or buying gold, investing in gold ETFs or purchasing gold bullion as an alternative to currency, something that many central banks have been increasingly doing, the world has been caught up in the throes of a major gold rush, one that seems to have no end in sight.
On one level, that's not surprising. Humankind has had an unconditional trust in gold and an unequivocal belief that nothing can ever diminish its worth, and in troubled times, gold has always been a safe haven for investors. The run-up in gold prices in the aftermath of the 2008–2009 financial crisis is proof of this. Even now, despite a recent market sell-off and a fall in the price of gold, the lure of this most precious of precious metals continues to attract investment dollars, and it remains the ultimate safe haven investment destination.
All the same, experts believe that the gold story may have changed slightly and that there has been a paradigm shift in how the investment world views gold. That paradigm shift will determine, they say, the direction of gold prices going forward and condition the forces that drive the price of gold up or down.
The Fear Factor Versus High Gold Prices
For the past few years, the fear factor—the extreme, all-consuming fear that governs investor attitude and investment choice—drove the price of gold to all-time highs. Gold is and always has been the ultimate investment to hedge fear, says Malcolm Gissen, founder of Malcolm H. Gissen & Associates and co-manager of the Encompass Fund (ENCPX). Even today, Gissen believes that fear is still rampant in the world. The ever-present fears over the health of the global financial system and the uncertainty over the United States and the global economy are very real, he says, and they will continue to drive the price of gold higher.
"I believe that the price of gold will continue to rise because I believe that we are still in an environment of fear," Gissen says.
Investor fear is based upon many factors, Gissen says, but at this point in time, Congress's inability to come to an agreement on how to deal with the country's deficit is one of the greatest drivers of fear.
"The constant headlines that we are no doubt going to continue seeing through 2012 about the lack of compromise between our political parties will drive investor fear," Gissen says. "We are so polarized as a nation and we have elected legislators that just don't seem able to compromise. So long as we have complete fear, people will invest in gold, no matter how high prices are."
According to Stephen Land, though, fear—or at any rate the deep-set, all-consuming fear of a systemic meltdown that investors had between 2008 and 2010—is not as much of a driver of gold prices as it was. Granted, the U.S. debt problem is very real, and the European sovereign crisis is still unresolved. But while investors may still be fearful of the impact of these issues, Land, the co-portfolio manager for Franklin Templeton Investments' Franklin Natural Resources Fund (FRNRX), believes they are less worried about the direction of the financial markets and the situation of the global economy, and more concerned about the actual price of gold itself as well as the possibility of having to buy gold again at record highs. As such, balancing the fear of a systemic meltdown against fear of paying too much for gold will determine its price going forward, he says.
"This trend is new and it shows that gold has, in a sense, grown up," Land says.
The greatest change in the gold price dynamic may well be that investors have made it clear that too much of a good thing may indeed be just that, and that there is a price level beyond which they will not pay for gold, no matter its status as the investment of last resort.
The recent dynamics of the gold trade have shown that gold can be as volatile as any other asset class, says Oliver Pursche, president of Gary Goldberg Financial Services and co-manager of the GMG Defensive Beta Fund (MPDAX). This has resulted in a realization that gold may not be as safe a haven as investors have always thought it to be.
More than that, though, investors seem to have come to the realization that a daily rise in gold prices with no fundamental valuation is unsustainable, he says.
"Too many investors were chasing gold without there being a fundamental justification for it," Pursche says. "In the past months, gold has sold off significantly as the dynamics of investing have changed, and as painful as it has been to some, it has brought some reality to the market and a recognition that there is no such thing as the price of gold always going up. It's hard to say what will happen going forward, but we have seen that investors will sell gold once it gets to a level where they feel the price is too much."
Inflation: The New Fear
The recent pullback from gold "let some air out of the balloon," says Pursche, and has resulted in a more realistic and measured approach toward it by investors. Of course, since that pullback, the price of gold has once again climbed, but Pursche expects that the rise will be more measured going forward, especially since many feel the global situation is not as precarious as it was.
But while investors may not be so fearful of an out-and-out systemic collapse, whatever concerns they have now are just as legitimate, particularly with respect to inflation, which many believe will be the strongest driver of gold prices going forward.
With central banks across the globe maintaining interest rates at low levels, the threat of inflation around the world is high, Land says, and this makes gold more attractive.
"If we do have inflation, there will be more printing of dollars and euros, and at the same time, we don't see a huge amount of [gold] mine supply coming," he says. "If we have inflation that results in, say, 15% money growth and gold is only growing at 2%, then its value is going to appreciate relative to paper currency."
Gold as a replacement for money has been an ongoing trend over the past few years and is set to become stronger in an inflationary environment, agrees Fred Sturm, who manages the Ivy Global Natural Resources Fund (IGNAX) for Waddell & Reed Ivy Investment Company. "As the stock of currency rises, the demand for gold has upward pressure, and this basically speaks to gold as a replacement for the debasement of money," he says. "We expect that monetary policy around the world will have an embedded inflation upside and the printing of money will continue, so we expect the upward trend in gold to continue."
The price of gold fell as the fear of a collapse of the banking system and a financial market meltdown became less pronounced, but now, with inflation looming on the horizon, gold once again has the potential to rise, agrees Nathan Rowader, Forward Management's director of investments and lead manager of the Forward Commodity Long/Short Strategy Fund (FCOMX).
"Gold is not such a great investment in a period of low inflation, but now we're stuck in an environment where everyone is looking at Europe to take action on the issues that plague it, and when Europe does, inflation will rise, so people will buy gold to hedge currencies," he says.
Gold allows for diversification away from the U.S. dollar, Land says, a move that many think is a good one to make in these times. Gold, he says, also has a very low correlation to major indices, so it provides great diversification opportunities.
The only thing that could crush the gold bug going forward would be "a central bank with a fly swatter," says Sturm, one that would raise real interest rates to 2%. But given all that's going on in the world, and the fact that central banks have been net buyers of gold as opposed to sellers, "we simply do not expect that that will happen within the next several years," he says.
And From Whence Comes the Gold
The demand for gold has been huge, but what about the supply of gold?
According to Gissen, the supply side of the gold story has been largely ignored thus far, but it has the potential to become more interesting to investors going forward when they realize how undervalued gold mining equities actually are.
"Because people, out of fear, wanted to invest in an asset that is durable, they poured their money into gold ETFs, but not into the mining companies, and they are now seriously undervalued," Gissen says. "But because of the strong demand for gold, many mining companies are sitting on piles of cash. Yet people are not aware of this because their fear led them to invest in the commodity."
It is much easier to invest in a gold ETF, Gissen says, because it takes time and decisiveness to decide what gold company to invest in. However, companies like Canada's Avion Gold and Extorre Gold Mines, an emerging gold and silver producer in Argentina, are companies with great potential that are worth looking at because they have solid cash reserves and their stocks are, at present, seriously undervalued.
There is little doubt that there is a big disconnect between gold, which is up 20%, and most gold equities, which are down, says Land. But for investors to consider those stocks as an investment alternative that forms a part of the overall gold story, they need to judge them for their ability to create wealth over time, not least because mining companies have historically not been the greatest of performers.
"Prior to 2005, they generated very little free cash, and there is 40 years worth of data to show that this is a value-destroying industry," Land says. "It is only now that we have seen margins starting to open up. With gold prices at $1,700 an ounce and the cost—including the cost to replace and extract—well below $1,000 an ounce, you are indeed looking at companies with very good prospects, and investors do not really understand this yet."
Like many resource sectors, gold mining companies can only create wealth by finding gold, and to the extent that companies have been successful in making discoveries, their shares have been rewarded, says Sturm. Companies like South Africa's Rand Gold have done well in terms of exploring and developing, and its share price has actually outperformed the gold bullion price, he says.
"But it is only recently that the gold price has advanced enough for profit margins to have improved substantially for major mining companies. In this backdrop, well-run companies with a deep resource base will indeed generate handsome profit margins and that will, in turn, make them attractive as investments."
If investors put their money into gold mining stocks, they could fare very well indeed, says Gissen.
"At this point, if the price of gold goes up, it will only go up by about 30% or so, but if you invest in any of the gold mining companies that are undervalued and they have a good year, they could double or even triple in value and keep going from there," he says. "We bought gold equities at $3 and now we see those stocks trading in the $20 range. In addition to investing in the gold itself, investors now need to look at who is actually getting them the gold."


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The Pittsburgh Steelers had already ruled out wide receiver Mike Wallace, tackle Mike Adams and cornerback Curtis Brown from being able to play in the team's season finale against the Cleveland Browns on Sunday.
On Saturday, the Steelers placed all three on injured reserve.
Wallace suffered a hamstring injury during the Steelers loss to the Cincinnati Bengals last week. Adams has missed the last four games for Pittsburgh dealing with an ankle injury. Brown also had an ankle issue.
Pittsburgh promoted receiver David Gilreath and defensive tackle Alameda Ta'Amu from their practice squad and claimed defensive tackle Hebron Fangupo off waivers from the Seattle Seahawks.
Ta'Amu, a fourth-round pick of the Steelers, was released by the team after a two-game suspension for a drunken driving incident in October. He was re-signed to the team's practice squad.
Gilreath has played in three games for the Steelers this season. He does not have a reception but does have one rush for seven yards.
Fangupo spent most of the season on Seattle's practice squad before being promoted to the active roster prior to last week's game against the San Francisco 49ers. He was released by the Seahawks on Friday.
Wallace finishes the season with 64 catches for 836 yards and eight touchdowns for the Steelers.

subset: commoncrawl


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April 30, 2014 - Lucca (Italy) and Stamford, CT (USA)
Tagetik Sponsors Ventana Research Benchmark Study Examining Business and Technology Transformations in the Office of Finance
Research results will provide a detailed picture of the current state and future direction of Finance providing critical insight for driving the future of Financial Performance and Analytics software
Ventana Research, a leading business technology research and advisory firm, recently launched a new benchmarking study focused on finance transformation – the shifting from transaction processing to more strategic, higher value functions. The study, sponsored by Tagetik, a global provider of enterprise software solutions for performance management, disclosure management, financial governance and business intelligence, will delve into the key pain points and priorities of today's finance organizations, identify technology trends, and highlight best practices used by the most innovative organizations.
The research survey is open to finance professionals at companies with more than 100 employees or more than $10M in annual revenue. To participate in the research click here to fill out the survey. Those participating in the research will receive a complete copy of the research results, complimentary registration to a webinar detailing research findings, and an Amazon gift card as a small thank you for their contribution. All qualified participants will be entered into a drawing to win one of 25 benchmark research reports and a 30-minute consultation with a Ventana Research Vice President.The study, expected for completion in Q3 2014, will examine a wide range of relevant factors, such as:
- Availability, accuracy, auditability and timeliness of finance data
- Adoption of advanced analytics and modeling
- Current uses of software and spreadsheets
- Specific finance initiatives conducted over last 18 months
- Considerations for software evaluation and selection
- Purchasing plans for new technology (what kind and when)
- Attitudes and beliefs about cloud-based applications
"Ventana's benchmarking research will give us valuable insight into the needs and priorities of finance organizations," said Dave Kasabian, senior vice president of product marketing & strategy at Tagetik. "We know that the next few years represent a critical turning point for most finance executives as they look to applications, analytics, and technology advancements to enable them to take a more strategic, forward-looking role. We want to ensure we're there for them – with the right offerings, at the right time – and this research will help us accomplish that."
"A generational change is taking place in business software," observed Robert Kugel, senior vice president and research director at Ventana Research. "Today's finance professionals have grown up with technology and have much higher expectations of what software should be able to do. At the same time, a decade of technology advances – especially in-memory computing and the growing sophistication of cloud-based applications – is giving them the opportunity to use these technologies to help redefine how finance departments operate, now and in the future, so they can be more of a strategic asset in their company's operations. This research will help pinpoint where organizations are today and how they planning for technology transitions that will drive the future of finance."
About Ventana Research
Ventana Research is the most authoritative and respected benchmark business technology research and advisory services firm. We provide insight and expert guidance on mainstream and disruptive technologies through a unique set of research-based offerings including benchmark research and technology evaluation assessments, education workshops and our research and advisory services, Ventana On-Demand. Our unparalleled understanding of the role of technology in optimizing business processes and performance and our best practices guidance are rooted in our rigorous research-based benchmarking of people, processes, information and technology across business and IT functions in every industry. This benchmark research plus our market coverage and in-depth knowledge of hundreds of technology providers means we can deliver education and expertise to our clients to increase the value they derive from technology investments while reducing time, cost and risk. To learn how Ventana Research advances the maturity of organizations' use of information and technology through benchmark research, education and advisory services, visit www.ventanaresearch.com.
Request a Demo
Our personalized demo allows you to speak directly with a senior solution specialist and discover the key functionalities of CCH Tagetik.
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For more information, please complete the form and a member of our team will reach out to you shortly!


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The critical software driving web sites, cloud computing, and other parts of our infrastructure are open source: free to download, change, and share. The role of open source software in healthcare is relatively hidden and uncelebrated, but organizations such as the tranSMART Foundation prove that it is making headway behind the scenes. tranSMART won three awards at the recent Bio‐IT World conference, including Best in Show.
The tranSMART Foundation is a non‐profit organization that develops creates software for translational research, performing tasks such as searching for patterns in genomes and how they are linked to clinical outcomes. Like most of the sustainable, highly successful open source projects, tranSMART avoids hiring programmers to do the work itself, but fosters a sense of community by coordinating more than 100 developers from the companies who benefit from the software.
I talked recently to Keith Elliston, CEO of the tranSMART Foundation. He explained that the tranSMART platform was first developed by Johnson & Johnson. When they realized they had a big project that other pharmaceutical companies could both benefit from and contribute to, they reached out to Pfizer, Millennium (now the Takeda Oncology Company), and Sanofi to collaborate on the development of the platform.
In 2012, Johnson & Johnson decided to release the platform as open source under the GPLv3 open source license. In early 2013, a group of scientists from the University of Michigan, Imperial College and the Pistoia Alliance gathered together to form the tranSMART Foundation, in order to steward the growing community development efforts on the platform. The growing foundation has garnered support from other major companies, including Oracle (whose database contained the data they were operating on), Deloitte, and PerkinElmer.
Two major challenges faced by open source projects are funding and community management. Elliston demonstrated to me that tranSMART is quite successful at both. The foundation currently receives 95% of their funding from members. In fact, as they develop, they would like to tap into grants and philanthropies, reducing the member funding to about 20%. In pursuit of that goal, the foundation recently gained 501(c)(3) non‐profit status in the US. They currently are sitting comfortably, with 12 months of secured funding, and are in the process of raising monies for both the foundation's Fellows program and their version 1.3 development program.
Like the Linux Foundation, a model for much of what tranSMART does, it offers two levels of membership. Gold membership costs $100,000 per year and earns the company a seat on the board of directors. Silver membership costs $5,000 to $20,000 per year based on several factors (size of the company, whether it is for‐profit or non‐profit, etc.) and allows one to participate in electing Silver member board directors.
Development is spread among a large number of programmers across the community. The most recent version of the software (1.2) was created mostly by developers paid by member companies. The foundation has set up working groups on which developers and community members volunteer to solve key tasks such as project management and defining the architecture. Developer coordination is spread across three main committees representing code, community, and content. These committees are composed of member representatives, and coordinate the working groups that carry out much of the foundation's mission.
Consequently, tranSMART evolves briskly and is seen by its users as meeting their needs. A major achievement of the 1.2 release was to add support for the open source relational database PostgreSQL (in addition to the original database, Oracle). Because the many of the large, semi‐structured sets of data tranSMART deals with may be more suited to some sort of NoSQL database, they are exploring a move to one of those options as a part of their research program. The architecture group is beginning to define version 2.0, and coding may start toward the end of this year.
Although headquartered in the US, tranSMART is finding 60% to 70% of its activity taking place in Europe, and is forming a sister organization there. Elliston claims that the current funding environment for genetic and pharma research is far more favorable in Europe, even though they are taking longer than the US to recover from the recent recession. As an example, he compared the 215 million dollars offered by the White House for its Precision Medicine Initiative (considered a major research advance here in the US) with the 3 billion Euros recently announced by Europe's Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI).
I asked Elliston how the tranSMART Foundation achieved such success in a field known to be difficult to open source projects. He said that they approached the non‐profit space with an entrepreneurial strategy learned in for‐profit environments, and focused on staying lean. For instance, they built out marketing and communications departments like a venture‐backed start‐up, using contractors drawn from their startup experience. Furthermore, they have assembled a team of highly experienced part‐time employees who spend most of their time in other organizations. Elliston himself devotes only 10 hours a week to his job as tranSMART CEO.
We could pause here to imagine what could be achieved if other parts of the health care industry adopted this open source model. For instance, the US contains 5,686 hospitals, of which half have installed what the government calls a "basic EHR system" (see page 12 of an ONC report to Congress). What if the 2,700‐odd hospitals saved the hundreds of millions each had spent on a proprietary API, and combined the money to spend a few billions developing a core open source EHR that each could adapt to its needs? What sort of EHR could you get for a couple billion dollars of developer time?
Naturally, technical and organizational obstacles would stand in the way of such an effort. Choosing an effective governing board, designing an open architecture that would meet the needs of 2,700 very diverse organizations, and keeping the scope reasonable are all challenges that go beyond the scope of this article. On the other hand, many existing projects could serve as a basis. VistA is used not only throughout VA hospitals but in many US hospitals and foreign national health care systems. OpenMRS is also widely ensconced in several African countries and elsewhere.
I believe tranSMART's success is hard to reproduce in the clinical environment for other reasons. tranSMART deals with pharmaceutical companies first and foremost, and biomedical academic researchers as well. Although neither environment focuses on computer technology, they work in highly technical fields and know how heavily they depend on computing. They are comfortable with trends in modern computing, and are therefore probably more comfortable conforming to the open source development model that is so widespread in computing.
In contrast, hospitals and clinics are run by people whose orientation is to other people. You can walk through one of these settings and find plenty of advanced technology, all driven by embedded computers, but the computing tends to be hidden. Anything that brings the clinician into close contact with the computer (notably the EHR) is usually cumbersome and disliked by its users.
The main users and managers in these environments are therefore not comfortable discussing computing topics and don't have any understanding of the open source model. Furthermore, because the EHRs are mostly insular and based on legacy technologies, the IT staff and programmers employed by the hospitals or clinics tend to be outside the mainstream of computing. Still, open source software is making inroads as support tools and glue for other systems. Open source EHRs also have seen some adoption, as I mentioned. The tranSMART Foundation persists as a model that others can aspire to.


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Mark Twain once said that there are two forces that can carry light to all corners of the world – sun and Associated Press. Today, we can argue about 'light' in news, which tell us about horrible things happening all over the world. In better case, there is an opportunity to hear something close to positive at the end to let people feel less hopeless. Nevertheless, humans need to know news, at least to understand the world they live in.
Long ago, people found out news thanks to some nomads or other travellers. And it was really good, considering that no other source of information was available. However, these stories were retold by people or retold by someone hundreds of times. What was the chance that a person heard a true or at least the initial version of a story? Moreover, people didn't travel as fast in those days. So-called news was delivered in weeks or months after an event happened.
And what do we have nowadays? Even the diversity of sources letting find out what is going on is huge, not even to mention the diversity of news. The newspaper is the traditional one. Some say newspapers are going to disappear someday, but it doesn't sound like truth. The argument may be naïve, but if they still exist, it means that people need printed press. Maybe, in latter amounts, but they still do.
TV is more interactive. You don't have to read, but receive a picture and sound instead. It can be even a relaxing activity if news aren't scary or depressive.
News In Nigeria
Finally, the Internet. Among its numerous functions and advantages, cognitive function is one of the basic ones. The Internet was always meant to keep people connected – with each other and with the world.
For staying connecting with Nigerian society and reading the latest news, visit
http://blog.jiji.ng/category/nigerian-news/. This is a website you can trust and rely on.


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|Ever Increasing QTP Tutorials.
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QuickTest Professional is most suitable Automation Software Testing Tool in this fast changing software development world.
Mercury QuickTest Professional : provides the industry's best solution for functional test and regression test automation - addressing every major software application and environment.
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Assessment |
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Cognitive Psychology: Attention · Decision making · Learning · Judgement · Memory · Motivation · Perception · Reasoning · Thinking - Cognitive processes Cognition - Outline Index
Face perception is the process by which the brain and mind understand and interpret the face, particularly the human face.
The face is an important site for the identification of others and conveys significant social information. Probably because of the importance of its role in social interaction, psychological processes involved in face perception are known to be present from birth, complex, involve large and widely distributed areas in the brain and can be selectively damaged to cause a specific impairment in understanding faces known as prosopagnosia.
From birth, infants possess rudimentary facial processing capacities. Infants as young as two days of age are capable of mimicking the facial expressions of an adult, displaying their capacity to note details like mouth and eye shape as well as to move their own muscles in a way that produces similar patterns in their faces.[1] However, despite this ability, newborns are not yet aware of the emotional content encoded within facial expressions. Five-month olds, when presented with an image of a person making a fearful expression and a person making a happy expression, pay the same amount of attention to and exhibit similar event-related potentials for both. When seven-month-olds are given the same treatment, they focus more on the fearful face, and their event-related potential for the scared face shows a stronger initial negative central component than the happy face. This result indicates an increased attentional and cognitive focus toward fear that reflects the threat-salient nature of the emotion.[2] In addition, infants' negative central components were not different for new faces that varied in the intensity of an emotional expression but portrayed the same emotion as a face they had been habituated to but were stronger for different-emotion faces, showing that seven-month-olds regarded happy and sad faces as distinct emotive categories.[3]
The recognition of faces is an important neurological mechanism that an individual uses every day. Jeffrey and Rhodes[4] said that faces "convey a wealth of information that we use to guide our social interactions."[5] For example, emotions play a large role in our social interactions. The perception of a positive or negative emotion on a face affects the way that an individual perceives and processes that face. A face that is perceived to have a negative emotion is processed in a less holistic manner than a face displaying a positive emotion.[6] The ability of face recognition is apparent even in early childhood. By age five, the neurological mechanisms responsible for face recognition are present. Research shows that the way children process faces is similar to that of adults, however adults process faces more efficiently. The reason for this may be because of improvements in memory and cognitive functioning that occur with age.[7]
Infants are able to comprehend facial expressions as social cues representing the feelings of other people before they have been alive for a year. At seven months, the object of an observed face's apparent emotional reaction is relevant in processing the face. Infants at this age show greater negative central components to angry faces that are looking directly at them than elsewhere, although the direction of fearful faces' gaze produces no difference. In addition, two ERP components in the posterior part of the brain are differently aroused by the two negative expressions tested. These results indicate that infants at this age can at least partially understand the higher level of threat from anger directed at them as compared to anger directed elsewhere.[8] At least seven months of age, infants are also able to use others' facial expressions to understand their behavior. Seven-month olds will look to facial cues to understand the motives of other people in ambiguous situations, as shown by a study in which they watched an experimenter's face longer if she took a toy from them and maintained a neutral expression than if she made a happy expression.[9] Interest in the social world is increased by interaction with the physical environment. Training three-month-old infants to reach for objects with Velcro-covered "sticky mitts" increases the amount of attention that they pay to faces as compared to passively moving objects through their hands and non-trained control groups.[10]
In following with the notion that seven-month-olds have categorical understandings of emotion, they are also capable of associating emotional prosodies with corresponding facial expressions. When presented with a happy or angry face, shortly followed by an emotionally-neutral word read in a happy or angry tone, their ERPs follow different patterns. Happy faces followed by angry vocal tones produce more changes than the other incongruous pairing, while there was no such difference between happy and angry congruous pairings, with the greater reaction implying that infants held greater expectations of a happy vocal tone after seeing a happy face than an angry tone following an angry face. Considering an infant's relative immobility and thus their decreased capacity to elicit negative reactions from their parents, this result implies that experience has a role in building comprehension of facial expressions.[11]
Several other studies indicate that early perceptual experience is crucial to the development of capacities characteristic of adult visual perception, including the ability to identify familiar others and to recognize and comprehend facial expressions.[12] The capacity to discern between faces, much like language, appears to have a broad potential in early life that is whittled down to kinds of faces that are experienced in early life.[12] Infants can discern between macaque faces at six months of age, but, without continued exposure, cannot at nine months of age. Being shown photographs of macaques during this three-month period gave nine-month-olds the ability to reliably tell between unfamiliar macaque faces.[13]
The neural substrates of face perception in infants are likely similar to those of adults, but the limits of imaging technology that are feasible for use with infants currently prevent very specific localization of function as well as specific information from subcortical areas[14] like the amygdala, which is active in the perception of facial expression in adults.[12] In a study on healthy adults, it was shown that faces are likely to be processed, in part, via a retinotectal (subcortical) pathway.[15]
However, there is activity near the fusiform gyrus,[14] as well as in occipital areas.[8] when infants are exposed to faces, and it varies depending on factors including facial expression and eye gaze direction.[3][8]
Adult face perceptionEdit
Theories about the processes involved in adult face perception have largely come from two sources: research on normal adult face perception and the study of impairments in face perception that are caused by brain injury or neurological illness. Novel optical illusions such as the Flashed Face Distortion Effect, in which scientific phenomenology outpaces neurological theory, also provide areas for research.
One of the most widely accepted theories of face perception argues that understanding faces involves several stages:[16] from basic perceptual manipulations on the sensory information to derive details about the person (such as age, gender or attractiveness), to being able to recall meaningful details such as their name and any relevant past experiences of the individual.
This model (developed by psychologists Vicki Bruce and Andrew Young) argues that face perception might involve several independent sub-processes working in unison.
- A "view centered description" is derived from the perceptual input. Simple physical aspects of the face are used to work out age, gender or basic facial expressions. Most analysis at this stage is on feature-by-feature basis. That initial information is used to create a structural model of the face, which allows it to be compared to other faces in memory, and across views. This explains why the same person seen from a novel angle can still be recognized. This structural encoding can be seen to be specific for upright faces as demonstrated by the Thatcher effect. The structurally encoded representation is transferred to notional "face recognition units" that are used with "personal identity nodes" to identify a person through information from semantic memory. The natural ability to produce someone's name when presented with their face has been shown in experimental research to be damaged in some cases of brain injury, suggesting that naming may be a separate process from the memory of other information about a person.
The study of prosopagnosia (an impairment in recognizing faces which is usually caused by brain injury) has been particularly helpful in understanding how normal face perception might work. Individuals with prosopagnosia may differ in their abilities to understand faces, and it has been the investigation of these differences which has suggested that several stage theories might be correct.
Face perception is an ability that involves many areas of the brain; however, some areas have been shown to be particularly important. Brain imaging studies typically show a great deal of activity in an area of the temporal lobe known as the fusiform gyrus, an area also known to cause prosopagnosia when damaged (particularly when damage occurs on both sides). This evidence has led to a particular interest in this area and it is sometimes referred to as the fusiform face area for that reason.[17]
Neuroanatomy of facial processingEdit
There are several parts of the brain that play a role in face perception. Rossion, Hanseeuw, and Dricot[18] used BOLD fMRI mapping to identify activation in the brain when subjects viewed both cars and faces. The majority of BOLD fMRI studies use blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) contrast to determine which areas of the brain are activated by various cognitive functions.[19] They found that the occipital face area, located in the occipital lobe, the fusiform face area, the superior temporal sulcus, the amygdala, and the anterior/inferior cortex of the temporal lobe, all played roles in contrasting the faces from the cars, with the initial face perception beginning in the fusiform face area and occipital face areas. This entire region links to form a network that acts to distinguish faces. The processing of faces in the brain is known as a "sum of parts" perception.[20] However, the individual parts of the face must be processed first in order to put all of the pieces together. In early processing, the occipital face area contributes to face perception by recognizing the eyes, nose, and mouth as individual pieces.[21] Furthermore, Arcurio, Gold, and James[22] used BOLD fMRI mapping to determine the patterns of activation in the brain when parts of the face were presented in combination and when they were presented singly. The occipital face area is activated by the visual perception of single features of the face, for example, the nose and mouth, and preferred combination of two-eyes over other combinations. This research supports that the occipital face area recognizes the parts of the face at the early stages of recognition. On the contrary, the fusiform face area shows no preference for single features, because the fusiform face area is responsible for "holistic/configural" information,[23] meaning that it puts all of the processed pieces of the face together in later processing. This theory is supported by the work of Gold et al.[20] who found that regardless of the orientation of a face, subjects were impacted by the configuration of the individual facial features. Subjects were also impacted by the coding of the relationships between those features. This shows that processing is done by a summation of the parts in the later stages of recognition.
Facial perception has well identified, neuroanatomical correlates in the brain. During the perception of faces, major activations occur in the extrastriate areas bilaterally, particularly in the fusiform face area (FFA), the occipital face area (OFA), and the superior temporal sulcus (fSTS).[24][25]
The FFA is located in the lateral fusiform gyrus. It is thought that this area is involved in holistic processing of faces and it is sensitive to the presence of facial parts as well as the configuration of these parts. The FFA is also necessary for successful face detection and identification. This is supported by fMRI activation and studies on prospagnosia, which involves lesions in the FFA.[24][25][26]
The OFA is located in the inferior occipital gyrus.[25] Similar to the FFA, this area is also active during successful face detection and identification, a finding that is supported by fMRI activation.[24] The OFA is involved and necessary in the analysis of facial parts but not in the spacing or configuration of facial parts. This suggests that the OFA may be involved in a facial processing step that occurs prior to the FFA processing.[24]
The fSTS is involved in recognition of facial parts and is not sensitive to the configuration of these parts. It is also thought that this area is involved in gaze perception.[27] The fSTS has demonstrated increased activation when attending to gaze direction.[24]
Bilateral activation is generally shown in all of these specialized facial areas.[28][29][30][31][32][33] However there are some studies that include increased activation in one side over the other. For instance McCarthy (1997) has shown that the right fusiform gyrus is more important for facial processing in complex situations.[26]
Gorno-Tempini and Price have shown that the fusiform gyri are preferentially responsive to faces, whereas the parahippocampal/lingual gyri are responsive to buildings.[34]
It is important to note that while certain areas respond selectively to faces, facial processing involves many neural networks. These networks include visual and emotional processing systems as well. Emotional face processing research has demonstrated that there are some of the other functions at work. While looking at faces displaying emotions (especially those with fear facial expressions) compared to neutral faces there is increased activity in the right fusiform gyrus. This increased activity also correlates with increased amygdala activity in the same situations.[35] The emotional processing effects observed in the fusiform gyrus are decreased in patients with amygdala lesions.[35] This demonstrates possible connections between the amygdala and facial processing areas.[35]
Another aspect that affects both the fusiform gyrus and the amygdala activation is the familiarity of faces. Having multiple regions that can be activated by similar face components indicates that facial processing is a complex process.[35]
Ishai and colleagues have proposed the object form topology hypothesis, which posits that there is a topological organization of neural substrates for object and facial processing.[36] However, Gauthier disagrees and suggests that the category-specific and process-map models could accommodate most other proposed models for the neural underpinnings of facial processing.[37]
Most neuroanatomical substrates for facial processing are perfused by the middle cerebral artery (MCA). Therefore, facial processing has been studied using measurements of mean cerebral blood flow velocity in the middle cerebral arteries bilaterally. During facial recognition tasks, greater changes in the right middle cerebral artery (RMCA) than the left (LMCA) have been observed.[38][39] It has been demonstrated that men were right lateralized and women left lateralized during facial processing tasks.[40]
Just as memory and cognitive function separate the abilities of children and adults to recognize faces, the familiarity of a face may also play a role in the perception of faces.[20] Zheng, Mondloch, and Segalowitz recorded event-related potentials in the brain to determine the timing of recognition of faces in the brain.[41] The results of the study showed that familiar faces are indicated and recognized by a stronger N250,[41] a specific wavelength response that plays a role in the visual memory of faces.[42] Similarly, Moulson et al.[43] found that all faces elicit the N170 response in the brain.
Hemispheric asymmetries in facial processing capabilityEdit
The mechanisms underlying gender-related differences in facial processing have not been studied extensively.
Studies using electrophysiological techniques have demonstrated gender-related differences during a face recognition memory (FRM) task and a facial affect identification task (FAIT). The male subjects used a right, while the female subjects used a left, hemisphere neural activation system in the processing of faces and facial affect.[44] Moreover, in facial perception there was no association to estimated intelligence, suggesting that face recognition performance in women is unrelated to several basic cognitive processes.[45] Gender-related differences[46] may suggest a role for sex hormones. In females there may be variability for psychological functions[47] related to differences in hormonal levels during different phases of the menstrual cycle.[48]
Data obtained in norm and in pathology support asymmetric face processing.[49][50][51] Gorno-Tempini and others in 2001, suggested that the left inferior frontal cortex and the bilateral occipitotemporal junction respond equally to all face conditions. Some neuroscientists contend that both the left inferior frontal cortex (Brodmann area 47) and the occipitotemporal junction are implicated in facial memory.[52][53][54] The right inferior temporal/fusiform gyrus responds selectively to faces but not to non-faces. The right temporal pole is activated during the discrimination of familiar faces and scenes from unfamiliar ones.[55] Right asymmetry in the mid temporal lobe for faces has also been shown using 133-Xenon measured cerebral blood flow (CBF).[56] Other investigators have observed right lateralization for facial recognition in previous electrophysiological and imaging studies.[57]
The implication of the observation of asymmetry for facial perception would be that different hemispheric strategies would be implemented. The right hemisphere would be expected to employ a holistic strategy, and the left an analytic strategy.[58][59][60][61] In 2007, Philip Njemanze, using a novel functional transcranial Doppler (fTCD) technique called functional transcranial Doppler spectroscopy (fTCDS), demonstrated that men were right lateralized for object and facial perception, while women were left lateralized for facial tasks but showed a right tendency or no lateralization for object perception.[62] Njemanze demonstrated using fTCDS, summation of responses related to facial stimulus complexity, which could be presumed as evidence for topological organization of these cortical areas in men. It may suggest that the latter extends from the area implicated in object perception to a much greater area involved in facial perception.
This agrees with the object form topology hypothesis proposed by Ishai and colleagues in 1999. However, the relatedness of object and facial perception was process based, and appears to be associated with their common holistic processing strategy in the right hemisphere. Moreover, when the same men were presented with facial paradigm requiring analytic processing, the left hemisphere was activated. This agrees with the suggestion made by Gauthier in 2000, that the extrastriate cortex contains areas that are best suited for different computations, and described as the process-map model. Therefore, the proposed models are not mutually exclusive, and this underscores the fact that facial processing does not impose any new constraints on the brain other than those used for other stimuli.
It may be suggested that each stimulus was mapped by category into face or non-face, and by process into holistic or analytic. Therefore, a unified category-specific process-mapping system was implemented for either right or left cognitive styles. Njemanze in 2007, concluded that, for facial perception, men used a category-specific process-mapping system for right cognitive style, but women used same for the left.
Verbal overshadowing and face identification Edit
A study by Wickham & Swift[63] looks at the role that articulatory suppression can have on verbal overshadowing and face identification. Verbal overshadowing is the phenomenon that verbally describing a face between presentation and test can impair identification of the face (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990). This study had the goal of looking to see how important verbal encoding is to face recognition and also how it interacts with verbal overshadowing by using articulatory suppression to force the individual to rely on their visual code instead of the phonological code. Participants were asked to perform a procedure that included studying a face carefully for five seconds. During these five seconds, they were repeating the word 'the'. Then, participants were either given one minute to write down a description of the face they just saw or were given a crossword puzzle to complete to distract them. Then, participants were shown ten faces, of which there were nine faces that were very similar and one face that was considered the target, or the one they just studied. This procedure was repeated twelve times for each participant. Researchers found several interesting conclusions from their study. First, they found that that "articulatory suppression significantly reduced the identification scores of no description participants but not the description participants." This means that articulatory suppression has an effect on facial identification in that it impairs one's ability to recognize a face. Interestingly, this study also found that when participants were using articulatory suppression, the verbal overshadowing effect did not occur. This would seem to suggest that the encoding of faces and the verbal overshadowing effect comes from a problem with the verbal code, not the visual code. Because having that distracter syllable did not hinder the individual's ability to recognize the face more than describing it did, it would not be a problem with disrupting what the participants encoded visually, but the verbal aspects that interferes and creates the verbal overshadowing effect.
From these studies, it can be seen how this information can be used in everyday life to help understand and improve memory. As discussed before, the studies shown that information is best encoded when there is no auditory information to interfere with the rehearsal of the information. This could be helpful to students who like to listen to music while studying or to anyone trying to encode information. The second study suggests that the ability to simultaneously interpret language might enable individuals to bypass the effects of articulatory suppression. Perhaps researchers would be able to investigate if being multi-lingual helps with this or if there is some brain process that makes it easier for them to encode information to memory and therefore to learn multiple languages and then easily interpret between them. Lastly, the study regarding face recognition and identification reinforces the notion that articulatory suppression interferes with an individual's ability to encode information.
Cognitive neuroscientists Isabel Gauthier and Michael Tarr are two of the major proponents of the view that face recognition involves expert discrimination of similar objects (See the Perceptual Expertise Network). Other scientists, in particular Nancy Kanwisher and her colleagues, argue that face recognition involves processes that are face-specific and that are not recruited by expert discriminations in other object classes (see the domain specificity).
Studies by Gauthier have shown that an area of the brain known as the fusiform gyrus (sometimes called the "fusiform face area, (FFA)" because it is active during face recognition) is also active when study participants are asked to discriminate between different types of birds and cars,[64] and even when participants become expert at distinguishing computer generated nonsense shapes known as greebles.[65] This suggests that the fusiform gyrus may have a general role in the recognition of similar visual objects. Yaoda Xu, then a post doctoral fellow with Nancy Kanwisher, replicated the car and bird expertise study using an improved fMRI design that was less susceptible to attentional accounts.
The activity found by Gauthier when participants viewed non-face objects was not as strong as when participants were viewing faces, however this could be because we have much more expertise for faces than for most other objects. Furthermore, not all findings of this research have been successfully replicated, for example, other research groups using different study designs have found that the fusiform gyrus is specific to faces and other nearby regions deal with non-face objects.[66]
However, these failures to replicate are difficult to interpret, because studies vary on too many aspects of the method. It has been argued that some studies test experts with objects that are slightly outside of their domain of expertise. More to the point, failures to replicate are null effects and can occur for many different reasons. In contrast, each replication adds a great deal of weight to a particular argument. With regard to "face specific" effects in neuroimaging, there are now multiple replications with Greebles, with birds and cars,[67] and two unpublished studies with chess experts.[68][69]
Although it is sometimes found that expertise recruits the FFA (e.g. as hypothesized by a proponent of this view in the preceding paragraph), a more common and less controversial finding is that expertise leads to focal category-selectivity in the fusiform gyrus—a pattern similar in terms of antecedent factors and neural specificity to that seen for faces. As such, it remains an open question as to whether face recognition and expert-level object recognition recruit similar neural mechanisms across different subregions of the fusiform or whether the two domains literally share the same neural substrates. Moreover, at least one study argues that the issue as to whether expertise-predicated category-selective areas overlap with the FFA is nonsensical in that multiple measurements of the FFA within an individual person often overlap no more with each other than do measurements of FFA and expertise-predicated regions.[70] At the same time, numerous studies have failed to replicate them altogether.[citation needed] For example, four published fMRI studies have asked whether expertise has any specific connection to the FFA in particular, by testing for expertise effects in both the FFA and a nearby but not face-selective region called LOC (Rhodes et al., JOCN 2004; Op de Beeck et al., JN 2006; Moore et al., JN 2006; Yue et al. VR 2006). In all four studies, expertise effects are significantly stronger in the LOC than in the FFA, and indeed expertise effects were only borderline significant in the FFA in two of the studies, while the effects were robust and significant in the LOC in all four studies.[citation needed]
Therefore, it is still not clear in exactly which situations the fusiform gyrus becomes active, although it is certain that face recognition relies heavily on this area and damage to it can lead to severe face recognition impairment.
- Main article: cross-race effect
Differences in own- versus other-race face recognition and perceptual discrimination was first researched in 1914[71] Humans tend to perceive people of other races than their own to all look alike:
Other things being equal, individuals of a given race are distinguishable from each other in proportion to our familiarity, to our contact with the race as whole. Thus, to the uninitiated American all Asiatics look alike, while to the Asiatics, all White men look alike.[71]This phenomenon is known as the cross-race effect, own-race effect, other-race effect, own race bias or interracial-face-recognition-deficit.[72] The effect occurs as early as 170ms in the brain with the N170 brain response to faces.[73] A meta-analysis, Mullen[citation needed] has found evidence that the other-race effect is larger among White subjects than among African American subjects, whereas Brigham and Williamson (1979, cited in Shepherd, 1981) obtained the opposite pattern. Shepherd also reviewed studies that found a main effect for race efface like that of the present study, with better performance on White faces,[74] other studies in which no difference was found,[75] and yet other studies in which performance was better on African American faces.[76] Overall, Shepherd reports a reliable positive correlation between the size of the effect of target race (indexed by the difference in proportion correct on same- and other-race faces) and self-ratings of amount of interaction with members of the other race, r(30) = .57, p < .01. This correlation is at least partly an artifact of the fact that African American subjects, who performed equally well on faces of both races, almost always responded with the highest possible self-rating of amount of interaction with white people (M = 4.75), whereas their white counterparts both demonstrated an other-race effect and reported less other-race interaction (M = 2.13); the difference in ratings was reliable, £(30) = 7.86, p < .01[77]
Further research points to the importance of other-race experience in own- versus other-race face processing (O'Toole et al., 1991; Slone et al., 2000; Walker & Tanaka, 2003). In a series of studies, Walker and colleagues showed the relationship between amount and type of other-race contact and the ability to perceptually differentiate other-race faces (Walker & Tanaka, 2003; Walker & Hewstone, 2006a,b; 2007). Participants with greater other-race experience were consistently more accurate at discriminating between other-race faces than were participants with less other-race experience.
In addition to other-race contact, there is suggestion that the own-race effect is linked to increased ability to extract information about the spatial relationships between different features.[78] Richard Ferraro writes that facial recognition is an example of a neuropsychological measure that can be used to assess cognitive abilities that are salient within African-American culture.[79] Daniel T. Levin writes that the deficit occurs because people emphasize visual information specifying race at the expense of individuating information when recognizing faces of other races.[80] Further research using perceptual tasks could shed light on the specific cognitive processes involved in the other-race effect.[77] The question if the own-race effect can be overcome was already indirectly answered by Ekman & Friesen in 1976 and Ducci, Arcuri, Georgis & Sineshaw in 1982. They had observed that people from New Guinea and Ethiopia who had had contact with white people before had a significantly better emotional recognition rate.
Studies on adults have also shown sex differences in face recognition. Men tend to recognize fewer faces of women than women do, whereas there are no sex differences with regard to male faces.[81]
In individuals with autism spectrum disorderEdit
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a comprehensive neural developmental disorder that produces many deficits including social, communicative,[82] and perceptual deficits.[83] Of specific interest, individuals with autism exhibit difficulties in various aspects of facial perception, including facial identity recognition and recognition of emotional expressions.[84][85] These deficits are suspected to be a product of abnormalities occurring in both the early and late stages of facial processing.[86]
Speed and methodsEdit
People with ASD process face and non-face stimuli with the same speed.[86][87] In typically developing individuals, there is a preference for face processing, thus resulting in a faster processing speed in comparison to non-face stimuli.[86][87] These individuals primarily utilize holistic processing when perceiving faces.[83] Contrastingly, individuals with ASD employ part-based processing or bottom-up processing, focusing on individual features rather than the face as a whole.[88][89] When focusing on the individual parts of the face, persons with ASD direct their gaze primarily to the lower half of the face, specifically the mouth, varying from the eye trained gaze of typically developing people.[88][89][90][91][92] This deviation from holistic face processing does not employ the use of facial prototypes, which are templates stored in memory that make for easy retrieval.[85][93]
Additionally, individuals with ASD display difficulty with recognition memory, specifically memory that aids in identifying faces. The memory deficit is selective for faces and does not extend to other objects or visual inputs.[85] Some evidence lends support to the theory that these face-memory deficits are products of interference between connections of face processing regions.[85]
Associated difficultiesEdit
The atypical facial processing style of people with ASD often manifests in constrained social ability, due to decreased eye contact, joint attention, interpretation of emotional expression, and communicative skills.[94] These deficiencies can be seen in infants as young as 9 months; specifically in terms of poor eye contact and difficulties engaging in joint attention.[86] Some experts have even used the term 'face avoidance' to describe the phenomena where infants who are later diagnosed with ASD preferentially attend to non-face objects over faces.[82] Furthermore, some have proposed that the demonstrated impairment in children with ASD's ability to grasp emotional content of faces is not a reflection of the incapacity to process emotional information, but rather, the result of a general inattentiveness to facial expression.[82] The constraints of these processes that are essential to the development of communicative and social-cognitive abilities are viewed to be the cause of impaired social engagement and responsivity.[95] Furthermore, research suggests that there exists a link between decreased face processing abilities in individuals with ASD and later deficits in Theory of Mind; for example, while typically developing individuals are able to relate others' emotional expressions to their actions, individuals with ASD do not demonstrate this skill to the same extent.[96]
There is some contention about this causation however, resembling the chicken or the egg dispute. Others theorize that social impairment leads to perceptual problems rather than vice versa.[88] In this perspective, a biological lack of social interest inherent to ASD inhibits developments of facial recognition and perception processes due to underutilization.[88] Continued research is necessary to determine which theory is best supported.
Neurology Edit
Many of the obstacles that individuals with ASD face in terms of facial processing may be derived from abnormalities in the fusiform face area and amygdala, which have been shown to be important in face perception as discussed above. Typically, the fusiform face area in individuals with ASD has reduced volume compared to normally developed persons.[97] This volume reduction has been attributed to deviant amygdala activity that does not flag faces as emotionally salient and thus decreases activation levels of the fusiform face area. This hypoactivity in the in the fusiform face area has been found in several studies.[88]
Studies are not conclusive as to which brain areas people with ASD use instead. One study found that, when looking at faces, people with ASD exhibit activity in brain regions normally active when typically developing individuals perceive objects.[88] Another study found that during facial perception, people with ASD use different neural systems, with each one of them using their own unique neural circuitry.[97]
Compensation mechanismsEdit
As ASD individuals age, scores on behavioral tests assessing ability to perform face-emotion recognition increase to levels similar to controls.[86][98] Yet, it is apparent that the recognition mechanisms of these individuals are still atypical, though often effective.[98] In terms of face identity-recognition, compensation can take many forms including a more pattern-based strategy which was first seen in face inversion tasks.[91] Alternatively, evidence suggests that older individuals compensate by using mimicry of other's facial expressions and rely on their motor feedback of facial muscles for face emotion-recognition.[99] These strategies help overcome the obstacles individuals with ASD face in interacting within social contexts.
Artificial face perceptionEdit
A great deal of effort has been put into developing software that can recognize human faces. Much of the work has been done by a branch of artificial intelligence known as computer vision which uses findings from the psychology of face perception to inform software design. Recent breakthroughs using noninvasive functional transcranial Doppler spectroscopy as demonstrated by Njemanze, 2007, to locate specific responses to facial stimuli have led to improved systems for facial recognition. The new system uses input responses called cortical long-term potentiation (CLTP) derived from Fourier analysis of mean blood flow velocity to trigger target face search from a computerized face database system.[100][101] Such a system provides for brain-machine interface for facial recognition, and the method has been referred to as cognitive biometrics.
Another interesting application is the estimation of human age from face images. As an important hint for human communication, facial images contain lots of useful information including gender, expression, age, etc. Unfortunately, compared with other cognition problems, age estimation from facial images is still very challenging. This is mainly because the aging process is influenced not only by a person's genes but also many external factors. Physical condition, living style etc. may accelerate or slow the aging process. Besides, since the aging process is slow and with long duration, collecting sufficient data for training is fairly demanding work.[102]
See alsoEdit
- Capgras delusion
- Cognitive neuropsychology
- Cross-race effect
- Delusional misidentification syndrome
- Eigenface
- Facial expressions
- Facial features
- Fregoli syndrome
- N170, an event-related potential associated with viewing faces
- Prosopagnosia
- Recognition of human individuals
- Social cognition
- Social perception
- Thatcher effect
References & BibliographyEdit
Key textsEdit
- Bruce, V. and Young, A. (2000) In the Eye of the Beholder: The Science of Face Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198524390
- Bruce, V. & Humphreys, G. W. (Eds.) (1994) Object and face processing. London: Erlbaum.
1Nelson, C.A. (2001) The development and neural bases of face recognition. Infant and Child Development, 10, 3-18.
2Bruce, V. & Young, A. (1986) Understanding face recognition. The British Journal of Psychology, 77 (3), 305-327.
3Kanwisher, NG, McDermott, J, Chun, MM. (1997) The fusiform face area: a module in human extrastriate cortex specialized for face perception. Journal of Neuroscience, 17 (11), 4302-11.
4Gauthier I, Skudlarski P, Gore JC, Anderson AW. (2000) Expertise for cars and birds recruits brain areas involved in face recognition. Nature Neuroscience, 3 (2), 191-7.
5Gauthier I, Tarr MJ, Anderson AW, Skudlarski P, Gore JC. (1999) Activation of the middle fusiform 'face area' increases with expertise in recognizing novel objects. Nature Neuroscience, 2 (6), 568-73.
6Grill-Spector K, Knouf N, Kanwisher N. (2004) The fusiform face area subserves face perception, not generic within-category identification. Nature Neuroscience, 7 (5), 555-62.
7Xu, Y. (2005). Revisiting the role of the fusiform and occipital face areas in visual expertise. Cerebral Cortex, 185, 1234-1242.
8Kargopoulos, P., Bablekou, Z., Gonida, E., & Kiosseoglou, G. (2003) Effects of face and name presentation on memory for associated verbal descriptors. The American Journal of Psychology, 116 (3), 415-430.
- Bower, G.H. and Karlin, M.B. (1974) Depth of processing pictures of faces and recognition memory, Journal of Experimental Psychology 103: 751-7.
- Bruce, V, and Young, A.W. (1986) Understanding face recognition, British Journal of Psychology 77: 305-27.
- Ellis, H.D., Shepherd, J.W. and Davies, G.M. (1979) Identification of familiar and unfamiliar faces from internal and external features: some implications for theories of face recognition, Perception 8: 431-9.
- Haig, N.D. (1984) The effect of feature displacement on face recognition, Perception 13: 505-12.
- Servos. P., Engel, S. A., Gati, J. and Menon, R. (1999) fMRI evidence for an inverted face representation in human somatosensory cortex, NeuroReport, 10, 1393-95.
Additional materialEdit
Ahrens, S.R. (1954) Beitrage zur Entwicklung des Physiognomie and Mimikerkennes {Contributions on the development of physiognomy and mimicry recognition], Zeitschrift fur Experimentelle and Angewandre Psychologie 2: 412-54.
- Goren, C.C., Sarty, M. and Wu, R.W.K. (1975) Visual following and pattern discrimination of face-like stimuli by new-born infants, Paediatrics 56: 544-9.
- Valentine, T. (1985) Identity priming in the recognition of familiar and unfamiliar faces, British Journal of Psychology 76: 373-83.
External links Edit
- FaceResearch – Scientific research and online studies on face perception
- Facial Expression Resources Page Links to research groups and other resources concerning facial expression perception, recognition and synthesis.
- Face Blind Prosopagnosia Research Centers at Harvard and University College London
- Perceptual Expertise Network (PEN) Collaborative group of cognitive neuroscientists studying perceptual expertise, including face recognition.
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To follow up "the Kinks-inspired popcraft of their underrated 2000 effort, Warning," STE "Green Day tears up the blueprint and comes up with something unexpected: a punk rock concept album built around elaborate melodies, odd tempo changes, and a collection of songs that freely reference classic rock warhorses like the Beatles and Pink Floyd." AV "It's a bit tempting to peg Green Day's sprawling, ambitious, brilliant seventh album, American Idiot, as their version of a Who album…but things aren't quite that simple. American Idiot is an unapologetic, unabashed rock opera, a form that Pete Townshend pioneered with Tommy, but Green Day doesn't use that for a blueprint as much as they use the Who's mini-opera 'A Quick One, While He's Away,' whose whirlwind succession of 90-second songs isn't only emulated on two song suites here, but provides the template for the larger 13-song cycle." STE
"But the Who are only one of many inspirations on this audacious, immensely entertaining album," STE "but reducing the album to its influences gives the inaccurate impression that this is no more than a patchwork quilt of familiar sounds, when it's an idiosyncratic, visionary work in its own right. First of all, part of Green Day's appeal is how they have personalized the sounds of the past, making time-honored guitar rock traditions seem fresh, even vital. With their first albums, they styled themselves after first-generation punk they were too young to hear firsthand, and as their career progressed, the group not only synthesized these influences into something distinctive, but chief songwriter Billie Joe Armstrong turned into a muscular, versatile songwriter in his own right." STE His "incisive, cutting lyrics…effectively convey the paranoia and fear of living in American in days after 9/11, but also veer into moving, intimate small-scale character sketches." STE
"Like all great concept albums, American Idiot works on several different levels. It can be taken as a collection of great songs – songs that are as visceral or as poignant as Green Day at their best, songs that resonate outside of the larger canvas of the story, as the fiery anti-Dubya title anthem proves – but these songs have a different, more lasting impact when taken as a whole. While its breakneck, freewheeling musicality has many inspirations, there really aren't many records like American Idiot…In its musical muscle and sweeping, politically charged narrative, it's something of a masterpiece, and one of the few – if not the only – records of 2004 to convey what it feels like to live in the strange, bewildering America of the early 2000s." STE
- one of the top 1000 albums of all time by Dave's Music Database
- rated best album of the year by DMDB
- Brits Award for International Album of the Year
- Q magazine – album of the year
- Rock and Roll Hall of Fame/NARM's Definitive Albums
Resources and Related Links:
- Green Day's DMDB Encyclopedia entry
- the DMDB page for American Idiot
- STE Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
- AV Aidin Vaziri, Amazon.com


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That business leaders are struggling with the implications of global, systemic, and structural change cannot be denied. After all, business has always had to deal with the sometimes chaotic processes of evolutionary change. During the Industrial Era, for example, the emphasis was on efficiency and a view that employees were just one more component of the production process.
Progressivism, otherwise known as "scientific management," assumed that employees were incapable of making decisions and needed to be directed or managed. Employees weren't trusted to do the right thing, nor were they empowered to contribute. Then along came Dave Packard, cofounder of Hewlett Packard, and other foresighted humanistic leaders who saw that the responsibility of a company went beyond designing an effective economic model to recognizing, as Packard put it, that "we had important responsibilities to our employees, to our customers, to our suppliers, and to the welfare of society at large."
Although many companies weren't as ready to trust their employees to the degree that Hewlett Packard did, some were prepared to flip the organizational chart and slowly move toward employee empowerment while still holding on to the reins. For most, though, making that leap of faith seemed riskier than sticking to what seemed to be the tried and true. However, that option is no longer viable for companies that want to survive and thrive.
Dave Packard's intuition served him well. He saw above and beyond the limits of thinking that were prevalent at that time. In his book The Biology of Transcendence, Joseph Chilton Pearce writes, "We actually contain a built-in ability to rise above restriction, incapacity, or limitation, and as a result of this ability, possess a vital adaptive spirit that we have not yet fully accessed." He further explains that we can intuitively sense this adaptive potential. I wonder if that desire for inspiring, engaging, fulfilling, and creative work arises naturally from deeper levels of knowing that we have unrealized potential waiting to be released.
And release it must, for we are at a pivotal point in our evolution. The accelerating degeneration of our natural systems, including climate change, diminishing biodiversity, and disruptions in our global food supply, confront us with some very complex issues to resolve. As ecological economist Herman Daly has pointed out, "The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse." A 1997 article in Nature estimated that "Through its natural resources, the earth provides $33 trillion worth of value per year to the global economy."1 Linear styles of management are simply too archaic to effectively respond to the uncertainty and complexity we now face. As our collective consciousness rises to meet these challenges, business has yet another opportunity to apply its considerable resources toward solutions.
Paradoxically, it is nature that provides the guidance.The LAMP index, created by investment advisor and author Jay Bragdon (Profit for Life), is rigorously screened to include companies that operate with integrity (where the means align with ends), value their employees, and follow the principles of nature. These principles include interdependence, where the success of the individual depends on the success of the whole and vice versa; nonlinear networks, which feature multiple feedback loops that serve to support self-regulation; and frugality, the efficient use of energy and resources.
"Globally, fewer than 4 percent of stock exchange–listed companies operate from core values of care and compassion," Bragdon explained to me. "Most people believe this approach to business is 'soft.' But when done with deep commitment and professional competence, it produces hard results. In 2009, for example, Global LAMP Index companies returned 44.56 percent, far surpassing returns on the S&P 500 (+26.46 percent) and the MSCI World Index (+28.01 percent). Over the past decade, Global LAMP Index companies returned 98.03 percent, while other benchmark companies collectively lost money."
If such achievements confront conventional wisdom that the profit-and-loss statement is the only measure of a successful business, then we are on the right track."Managing a company as if it were a profit-making machine imposes a linear-thinking mentality that blinds it to important relationships . . . Managing a company as if it were a living organism, which it is, creates a radically different and more beneficial set of relationships."2
Systems thinking maps these relationships, most often as thought patterns, cycles, and feedback loops. By combining systems thinking with insights from such emerging trends as the internalization of social and environmental responsibility, open and crowd sourcing, social enterprise, increases in self-employment, and other indicators of change, a wider and more integrated map emerges that shows these interrelationships on a global scale. And in order to seize the opportunity available to work with rather than against the emerging forces of change, a higher level of consciousness is needed.
A Reckoning of Forces
Force 1: A Shift of Consciousness. Scientific analysis of the Mayan calendar tells us that we are right where we are supposed to be.The connection between the Mayan Calendar and contemporary systems thinking was presented in an award-winning paper by Slovenian professor Tadeja Jere Lazanski at the 2009 Computing Anticipatory Systems Conference. Most modern-day businesses, she explained in her paper "Ancient Maya's Evolution of Consciousness and Contemporary Systems Thinking," grew up during what the Mayan Calendar describes as the "seventh step" of consciousness:
"The seventh step of consciousness, from 1755 to 1999, was a consciousness of power, where there was no place for integration but analyzing, separation, creating towers of power, wars, and manipulation. This is a reason that no one would think of connection and integration, of systems thinking in its highest meaning — not one philosopher or politician."
In other words, there was no receptivity for the kinds of connected consciousness we see appearing today. Everything was neatly sorted into black and white, with no tolerance for ambiguity or shades of gray. Duality prevailed: right-wrong, good-evil, environment-economy, green-profit. Differences of opinion were pitted against each other as opposing ideas rather than a piece of the larger picture. Power meant the ability to control or influence others rather than mastery of the self. Left brain–right brain was synonymous for practical and impractical. You took your left, linear, analytical brain to work and used your right, creative brain for family matters and hobbies. A focus on the short term was being practical; a focus on the long term was considered pointless given the expectation of volatility and uncertainty.
Those operating from this mind-set will, by force of habit, have a great deal of difficulty shifting to a more holistic, big-picture view unless they agree to boldly commit to doing so. And the pressure to do so is intensifying.
From now until the end of 2011, we are (from the Mayan perspective) in the eighth level: "a consciousness of ethics," writes Lazanski, "where all the towers of manipulation and of negative power are collapsing. Ethics in the higher sense refers to spontaneous solutions through the application of law and power to the benefit of everyone. It shines from within and is personal, knowing the right thing to do and doing it. It is a refined consciousness. Now, the powerful people who make the laws and lead the nations and societies cannot get away with anything without being exposed; all abuses of power are becoming uncovered." Look no further than the recent Wall Street meltdown for proof.
The ninth and next step leads "the planet to one harmonious system" of conscious cocreation. Affirming that evolutionary step is a finding published by IBM in its 2010 survey of global CEOs titled "Capitalizing on Complexity": social networking has exponentially increased the degree of interaction customers and citizens expect of organizations. It isn't enough just to collaborate anymore. Today, the watchword is 'cocreate.'
Force 2: From organizations structured on Newtonian principles to those structured on quantum principles. Newtonian principles operate quite well in a simple, linear world. They rely on materialism, reductionism, and determinism — the idea that the only thing that matters is matter and that outcomes are predictable and controllable. Quantum principles, by comparison, recognize that everything is energy; everything is connected, interrelated, entangled, and uncertain. In today's reality, where the context for day-to-day living is characterized as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA), such an understanding is imperative to survival. Companies that remain attached to the hope that these underlying conditions will follow old rules face certain decline.
Force 3: From controlling behavior to focusing on performance and results. We are used to thinking up and down when it comes to hierarchical organizations, but that is not how phenomenal results are produced. Nick Zeniuk, now retired from Ford, described the shift to me in this way: "The traditional managerial system is based on the concept of control, which was a reasonable concept fifty to one hundred years ago, when managers and senior managers knew enough about the business to effectively control the business.
Many of the managerial systems in our organizations are based on controlling behavior: the performance systems, the reporting systems, the reward systems, and quality control mechanisms like Six Sigma. That is no longer a valid system. The realization that we were operating under the illusion that we, as executives, could control the outcome was quite a startling discovery. What I discovered personally and what we are discovering now is that our focus needs to be redirected from control and behavior to results or performance — because when we focus on performance, we are focusing on those attributes that enable us to achieve the results we want." In this process, trust is essential — trust in one's own sense of inner power and trust that people will do the right thing when given a shared and worthwhile goal. Effective managers no longer control performance but support it. Higher levels of personal mastery then become a prerequisite.
Force 4: From hierarchical leadership to leadership at all levels — top-down, bottom–up, and sideways. Collective intelligence emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals, with the group having a higher level of knowledge than the individuals in it. Collective intelligence happens through networks of performance that cut horizontally across a company's hierarchical structure. Social scientist Dennis Sandow and his client, Anne Murray-Allen, formerly of Hewlett Packard, mapped out networks of performance at HP to understand how, as complexity increased along with the growth of the inkjet cartridge division, that division performed at a consistently high level of achievement over time.
"What I have learned from working in organizations where we had truly phenomenal results day after day after day is that leadership does not come from position; it comes from a place of contribution. It can come from anywhere in the organization. It is based on who is in a position to see what no one else can see, to make the contribution that everyone can get behind and support. My experience from working in organizations for over thirty years is that it is in our nature to be motivated by two things. First, we all want to make a big contribution, not just a contribution but one that is significant. It drives us in terms of purpose. Second, we all want to belong. We are social and emotional beings. We know now from what have learned through neural and cognitive science that we are hardwired to be together and collaborate."3
Sandow and Murray-Allen also discovered that the people involved in achieving a goal rarely showed up on the organizational chart. In fact, they discovered that most of the people working on a particular objective were from outside of HP and included customers, competitors, suppliers, and anyone else who needed to be a part of it.
Jay Bragdon calls this phenomenon "relationship equity." "Relational equity is the foundation of financial equity," he writes. "How companies relate to employees, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders matters more than most people think. Corporate leaders who understand this build cultures that inspire systems thinking and organizational learning. Those who do it well catalyze a powerful, reinforcing cycle of profit, which turns their firms into innovation hothouses."4 Employees might describe this as taking your whole self to work, doing work that truly matters, and contributing to a hopeful future.
Tools for Transformation
To accelerate the evolution of leadership and innovation from the old model to a new one, we need to let go of a few habits.
1. Overreliance (or addiction) to linear and analytical thinking. Life does not operate on a runway; it operates as a network, a web of complex and interconnected systems.Linear-logical thinkers link one thought to another in an orderly sequence until a story or thread is constructed that makes logical sense. Analytical thinking takes a concept apart to its more manageable pieces. Both were effective in a simpler world when interrelationships could be ignored at minimal risk. In the workplace, linear thinking is heard whenever older generations depict the exceptionally creative Gen Y as "the entitlement generation" who need to "suck it up" and "pay their dues" on the same career runway they experienced. As creativity becomes the talent du jour, linear thinking can still offer support for implementing creative ideas. But seeing the value in different ways of thinking and processing information must come first. It starts by listening with the intention to understand rather than to be right.
2. The temptation to file and sort new ideas and incoming data so it feels like they have been handled.This is one of the greatest temptations and pitfalls of reacting to complexity. Clarity is achieved by seeing the system, not getting lost in the details. Everything is connected to everything else. The moment you file it, you've lost the link to an interrelated dynamic. Fish might be managed by one government department, forestry by another, and the environment by a third. Though administratively convenient, nature ignores such political boundaries.
Further, there is a temptation to place anything outside the norm in the "woo-woo" or "New Age" file, where you'll find alternative health, quantum physics, and holistic thinking. This habitual dismissal of new concepts unnecessarily narrows options and diminishes the capacity to see the whole picture. Developing sufficient self-awareness to know when your coping strategy is "file and sort" versus "listen and absorb" is critical.
3. Negative thinking and limiting beliefs. Uncertainty can provoke fear. Deepening the skill set and ability to regulate emotions reduces stress and opens possibilities. Limiting beliefs operate both consciously and unconsciously. The former are readily identifiable, the latter are not, so it takes a deepening of our inner skills to spot the telltale patterns and know what to keep and what to release. Upgrading personal mastery and expanding self-knowledge are inherent and imperative in such a process.
Systems thinking recognizes that we are a part of the system, not above it. Identifying attachments to old patterns of thought, belief, and habit about how the world works allows new innovations and our greater human potential to emerge.
Organizations as Living Systems
"Companies that model themselves on living systems typically practice what I call living-asset stewardship (LAS)," writes Bragdon in "Capitalism as a Human System." "To them, profit is not so much a goal in itself as the means to a higher end of service. When such ends are condensed into a compelling vision — one that calls forth the life-affirming instincts and future hopes of employees — the firm becomes a profoundly inspirational workplace. The operating leverage in this is easy to understand. Employees who work with their hearts as well as their minds are more productive than those who simple 'do a job."5
Project Shakti (meaning "strength" in Sanskrit) was started by Hindustan Lever, Unilever's Indian division, in 2000. They turned to local women entrepreneurs to distribute products to their rural communities. By 2008, there were 45,000 women distributing $3 million worth of products to 100,000 villages. For Unilever, the rural Indian communities, and the women entrepreneurs, this is an "everyone wins" solution, creating a vast rural marketing network through the resources of the community. By trusting that the local community networks would do what would best serve the entire system, Unilever tapped into a deep well of motivation, creativity, and commitment. Unilever is also behind the establishment of the Marine Stewardship Council, now recognized as the good housekeeping seal of approval for sustainable fishing.
Such initiatives represent good examples of next-stage corporate evolution as well-intentioned businesses move toward a higher level of planetary stewardship. Perfection is not the goal; "self-actualization" is a process so mistakes will happen. To stay on track and overcome the temptation to lose focus, organizations must commit to continual learning and maintain allegiance to a higher purpose.
When control is replaced by trust and the joy of being in service to something larger than oneself, tacit knowledge emerges — the innate know-how unique to each person. The power of our human potential is unleashed and the community as a whole becomes healthier. The simplicity of complexity is that by making a leap of faith, trusting people to do the right thing, supporting development of an employee's wholeness (self-actualization), and actively stewarding our relationship with nature, organizations will nurture the most powerful source of innovation — the human spirit.
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Fluent with the science behind self-actualization, Dawna Jones develops leaders who can function in any environment, helping them to clear hidden barriers to achievement while restoring entrepreneurial intuition. She knows it is the power of the human spirit that drives creativity and radical innovation and contributes big-picture thinking and deep personal insights to that process. (www.FromInsightToAction.com)
About the Author
Dawna Jones
Fluent with the science behind self-actualization, Dawna Jones develops leaders who can function in any environment, helping them to clear hidden barriers to achievement while restoring entrepreneurial intuition
Executive Fireside Chat: The Power of Intuition
Increased amounts of information, complexity and the need to adapt business cultures to engage and keep talent requires being plugged into your intuition