Dr. Jessie Peissig

Dr. Peissig is an Associate Professor of Psychology at California State University: Fullerton. Dr. Peissig’s research focuses on various aspects of visual perception. In a set of studies in collaboration with Dr. Cindy Bukach, birders were tested to determine the limits of visual expertise (i.e. Can training be generalized?). In her own lab, Dr. Peissig utilizes a face database of normal, disguised, and emotional faces-which she collected while at Brown University-to study how people recognize faces that have been disguised, such as adding glasses or hair changes. At CSUF she has collected a new emotion database that includes posed and genuine expression stimuli which are used to test people’s ability to recognize subtle, genuine emotions compared to posed expressions. Her lab is also exploring the role of eyebrows in face recognition, as a compared to the eyes alone and the mouth. Finally, they are exploring the role of makeup in attractiveness by testing the perceptual biases that are involved in where and why females use makeup to increase attractiveness.

Dr. Peissig’s lab collaborates with the Beyond Categories lab on projects related to Expertise. For more information on these projects, please see the Expertise Research Theme page.