Currently I study how vision makes sense of global and local information. Holistic processing has long been treated as a special property of face perception. My work challenges that view. Using carefully controlled non-face objects, I show that when recognition depends on configural information, object perception can also become holistic. This suggests that global structure is not a niche component of face perception, but a fundamental source of visual information that has been overlooked. I use behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, and computational modeling to study how humans and models represent local features, global structure, and the relationship between them.