Cognitive Human Categorization. The Situative Ebb and Flow of Relevant Categorization (B01)

• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442261292

The project will result in a better understanding of sorting processes in the medium of prelingual-unconscious differentiation. By utilizing social-psychological facial recognition experiments, the aim is to clarify what the relevant factors are that guide the situative ebb and flow of human categories. Using similarity judgements and confusion frequency it will be ascertained what cognitive schema is dominant. The oftentimes central research question of whether a categorization occurs “spontaneously according to X” will be expanded upon with a theoretical model of the conditional context: “When and under what conditions categorization occurs spontaneously according to X?”

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1482: Studies in Human Categorization
• Applicant Institution: Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
• Project Head: Professor Dr. Roland Imhoff