SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Hub Lab Writing the Book on Face-Reading
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
Pity the Boston car salesman who negotiated across the table from Charles A. Nelson III, a Harvard neuroscience professor who runs the nation's top laboratory studying how people learn to decode facial expressions.
As the two men faced off in the showroom last month, the salesman insisted to Nelson that he had just offered the absolute lowest price for the German car in question, declaring, "This is it."
Then the salesman's eyes darted to a vacant corner, his nose and mouth taking on a configuration that shouted "Bluff." The professor ultimately left the dealership smiling, holding a contract to buy the car at a far lower price, a bargain in his estimation. Such is one ancillary benefit of Nelson's exhaustive research, which unfolds every day in his $1.5 million cognitive neuroscience laboratory at Children's Hospital Boston, where he studies just when and how humans learn to read faces.
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