Catherine Caldwell-Harris

Teaches KHC PS 101: Revolutions in the Conceptualization of Mind: 1950s to the Present

Catherine Caldwell-Harris trained at UC San Diego from 1985 to 1991, where she studied under the guidance of Elizabeth Bates, Jeffrey Elman, David Rumelhart, Rama Ramachandran, Ronald Langacker, Patricia Churchland, and (via CMU) Brian MacWhinney and Jay McClelland. She has been a faculty member at BU since 1991.

Caldwell-Harris’ research interests are broad, encompassing diverse aspects of language processing, including second language acquisition, emotional aspects of language, and word recognition. She is the first researcher to document that emotion words elicit larger skin conductance responses in a first language than in a second. She is currently studying emotional reactivity in the US for speakers who grew up speaking Russian, Mandarin, or Spanish, as well as English native speakers who learned Russian as a foreign language. Caldwell-Harris is also interested in how units larger than single words are important for fluency and efficiency in all types of language processing.

In word recognition, Caldwell-Harris has expertise in an intriguing visual/cognition illusion called repetition blindness. She has shown how illusory words can be created by embedding word fragments in the visual stream, as in “pain grain avy” (leads to report of “gravy”). She has used repetition blindness and the same/difference task to investigate how diacritic letters are represented in Turkish. With German colleagues Martin Heil and Michael Niedeggen, Calwell-Harris has used this technique to explore consciousness. They conclude that what viewers perceive is more important for subsequent brain states and processing than what is actually in the visual input. A new model of repetition blindness and orthographic priming appeared in 2009 in the journal Cognitive Psychology.

In her cross-cultural research, Caldwell-Harris is the originator (with Ayse Aycicegi) of the Personality-Culture Clash hypothesis. They propose that mental health is facilitated by having a personality in tune with cultural values.