The effect of culture on individual perceptual mechanisms

The goal of our project is to examine how culture, as represented by language, can affect low-level perceptual function--in our case hearing. Although studies of low-level perception have assumed that it is largely universal, there have been reports that lower-level perceptual function varies between cultures. Here we put forward and test the hypothesis that the effect of language milieu on perception is via a process called ensemble perception.

UC PI:
David Whitney
Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley

France PI:
Mark Wexler
Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center, CNRS / Université de Paris