Grant: Canada Research Chairs

In the field of psychology, a substantial majority of research has been conducted on individuals classified as "WEIRD," an acronym denoting their "Western," "Educated," "Industrialized," "Rich," and "Democratic" characteristics. These individuals represent a mere 5% of human diversity, and numerous findings indicate that conclusions drawn from WEIRD samples may not be applicable to non-WEIRD populations. The candidate's groundbreaking program stands out as one of the rare international initiatives delving into how an individual's cultural upbringing influences their perception of faces. The proposed program for the next five years comprises three core objectives. While online data collection has gained popularity in the past decade, it falls short in ensuring the meticulous control of the physical properties of visual stimuli, a customary practice in vision science. The primary aim of this program's first axis is to develop tools that facilitate behavioral experiments on more diverse samples while upholding the rigorous data quality standards of vision sciences. Leveraging the new technologies developed during her first term, the candidate will employ an innovative, data-driven approach to cultural operationalization in the second and third axes. She will harness cutting-edge techniques from the fields of vision sciences, affective sciences, and cultural psychology to amass the most extensive and diverse dataset to date on face perception. Specifically, in the second axis, a data-driven psychophysical method crafted by the candidate and her team during her initial term will uncover the multitude of low-level visual information processes during face perception. In the third axis, the candidate aims to conduct behavioral assessments of global norms for facial expressivity, advancing our comprehension of how they impact the recognition of facial expressions. This program will forge a path towards a paradigm shift in our understanding of human cognition and visual perception, representing a significant stride toward a comprehensive grasp of the visual mechanisms underpinning face perception. This research niche is distinctive in Quebec and acutely pertinent in today's context of globalization and multiculturalism.