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Undergraduate Research at UMass Dartmouth
Early psychological empirical research studied
how speech sounds were perceived categorically
(Liberman, Harris, Hoffman, & Griffith, 1957). Due
to advancing technology and computer software,
work on CP has also been extended to the human
face. CP has been found to be present in the
perception of facial expressions (Etcoff & Magee,
1992), familiar facial identities (Beale & Keil,
1995), gender information (Campanella, Chrysochoos,
& Bruyer, 2001), and emotion (Fugate,
Gouzoules, & Barrett, 2010). CP has also been
studied in terms of race. For example, Levin and
Angelone (2002) found that, similar to gender, CP
was stronger for different race facial morphs than
for facial morphs of the same racial group.
In addition, categorical perception of social constructs,
including emotion and race, are affected by
a perceiver’s conceptual knowledge, including his/
her language (Barrett, 2006 a/b; Fugate, 2013). Specifically,
when the meaning of a word is activated,
people show more willingness to accept non-target
emotional stimuli as a category member (Fugate,
Gendron, Nakashima, & Barrett, 2017). Said another
way, they are less “accurate” at matching images because
their categories for that item have increased
to include more instances. In this manner, people
are becoming more “open-minded” and flexible
with what constitutes a category member. Directly
related to the current project, Tskhay and Rule
(2015) showed that participants perceived racially
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Poster of Anna Sullivan’s research project