Processing of Faces: Attentional capture, portrait drawing, and individual recognition skills.

Over the years, my interest has been in understanding how people’s specific visual or emotional experience shapes the way they view and attend to the world. Incidentally, my different lines of research all end up revolving around the process of identification. I will briefly outline the results of my work on self-recognition, visual attention and portrait artists. Then I’ll focus on a recent study examining individual differences in real-world person recognition abilities. I exploited the series Game of Thrones, which introduced numerous unknown actors over 6 years, in order to challenge people’s recognition and memory abilities and to determine the limits of people with superior recognition skills. The study shows that individual differences in person recognition involve a variety of cognitive skills and that superior recognisers are not immune to errors. Results highlight a need for new methods for studying person recognition in the general population; and for assessment tools used in clinical and forensics contexts.

Bio: I did my PhD at the University of Liege with Serge Bredart on visual self-recognition, followed by a first post-doc on visual attention with Jan Theeuwes at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I then devoted almost two years to artistic endeavours and focused on portraiture, while completing a degree in criminalistics and forensic psychiatry. This artistic practice led to new research avenues on face processing in portrait artists, and I went back to academia through a second post-doc with Gina Grimshaw at Victoria University of Wellington, working on cognitive control. I am currently lecturing at Victoria and examining individual differences in face processing skills.