The University of Chicago
Department of Psychology
5848 South University Avenue
Chicago, IL, 60637
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Shannon Heald
Background
Shannon Heald is a fourth year graduate student in the Cognitive Psychology Program at the University of Chicago. She has successfully defended her Master's Thesis, titled "Distributional and Anchoring Effects on the Estimation of Horizontal Lines."
Shannon graduated from the University of Chicago in 2002, with a A.B. in Psychology. As an undergraduate in the college she worked with Dr. Janellen Huttenlocher. This undergraduate work lead to her Master's research which explored the natural biases associated with the use of category information, as well as how these category biases originate in the spatial domain.
For her dissertation Shannon has focused on the structure and maintenance of phonological categories. Her research examines if a general theory for categorization can explain the plasticity and internal structure of phonetic categories. Specifically she will investigate the relevancy of a model of categorization set forth by Huttenlocher et al. to explain how phonetic information is represented in long-term memory and what effect new acoustic-phonetic information has on that information. This research also hopes to provide a more rigorous definition for the term prototype in relation to phonetic categories.
Research Interests
• Natural Biases and their influences on the
categorization process
• Environmental effects on categorization structure
• Circadian rhythms and their possible effects on
categorization consolidation
• The application of general categorization models
• The application of general categorization models
