Ralph Hale, Ph.D.
Ralph G. Hale earned his Ph.D. in Psychology with a focus on Visual Perception and Memory from the University of Georgia in 2018. Prior to his doctoral program, Ralph earned an Associate of Arts degree from Gainesville State College in 2009 followed by Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from the University of Georgia in 2011 and 2015, respectively. In 2018, Ralph was awarded the Charles L. Darby Award for outstanding graduate teaching as well as the Richard L. Marsh Award for extraordinary commitment to research mentoring while at UGA. Since joining UNG, Ralph has been awarded the Teaching Excellence Award for Tenure-Track Faculty in 2020. He has also been awarded grants for classroom projects from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (2020), Faculty Undergraduate Summer Engagement (2021), and for academic writing from UNG’s Center for Teaching, Learning, and Leadership (2018).
Ralph is dedicated to mentoring undergraduate students in educational, research, and professional settings to help them chart successful courses toward their eventual career objectives. His research mentees have worked on a wide variety of cognitive research projects and presented their findings at professional research conferences. Ralph values his service to his students, University, and surrounding community. He serves on an assortment of departmental and University committees in addition to advising, mentoring, and judging for conferences and fairs. Ralph is a member of many professional organizations including Vision Sciences Society, Psychonomic Society, and American Association of University Professors – and often attends conferences for these organizations and others. Ralph’s research interests focus largely on the impact of global context and ecological validity as they relate to a variety of factors related to visual perception and memory.
Ralph's current research focuses on an investigation of the impact of global context and ecological validity on various visual illusions (e.g., illusory color spreading) and visual memory errors (e.g., boundary extension). The eventual goal of this line of inquiry is to determine what these illusions and visual memory errors tell us about our typical day-to-day visual perceptions by examining these visual phenomena in more ecologically valid global configurations. Additionally, Ralph is generally interested in a broad array of visual factors including color vision, figure-ground organization, object and scene recognition, visual search, illumination, social gaze, attention, iconic memory, visual short-term memory, and multimodal memory.
Hale, R.G. & Brown, J.M. (2021). Influence of context on spatial expanse of color spreading in the watercolor illusion. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-021-02306-0
Brown, J. M., Breitmeyer, B. G., Hale, R. G., & Plummer, R. W. (2018). Contrast sensitivity indicates processing level of visual illusions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 44(10), 1557-1566. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000554
McDunn, B. A., Brown, J. M., Hale, R. G., & Siddiqui, A. P. (2016). Disentangling boundary extension and normalization of view memory for scenes. Visual Cognition, 24:5-6, 356-368, doi: 10.1080/13506285.2016.1274810
Hale, R.G., Brown, J.M. & McDunn, B.A. (2016). Increasing task demand by obstructing object recognition increases boundary extension. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23: 1497. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-016-1018-5
Hale, R.G., Brown, J.M., McDunn, B.A., & Siddiqui A.P. (2015). An influence of extremal edges on boundary extension. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 22: 961. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-014-0751-x
2018 – present, Assistant Professor of Psychological Science, University of North Georgia, Gainesville, GA.
2012 – 2018, Teaching / Research Assistant, University of Georgia, Athens, GA.
Professional Affiliations: