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Associate Professor, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders & School of Psychology, The University of Western Australia

My research aims to understand the perceptual, cognitive, and neural mechanisms underlying person perception. This often involves studying faces, as they provide information about the identity, age, sex, race, attractiveness and mood of other people, but also involves studying the perception of bodies and voices.

In addition to our work with typically developing children and adults, my lab also investigates person perception in children and adults with atypical development, psychopathology, or brain injury. This includes studies of developmental disorders affecting face processing (congenital/developmental prosopagnosia and autism); neuropsychological studies of people with brain injuries affecting face identity recognition (acquired prosopagnosia) and expression recognition (amygdala/orbitofrontal cortex lesions); and investigations into psychopathology affecting person perception (social anxiety, borderline personality disorder, callous-unemotional traits).

Our research to date has addressed three main questions:
1. What is the role of visual attention in face perception?
2. Why can't some children and adults recognise facial identity?
3. How do we discriminate facial expressions?

Experience

  • –present
    Associate Professor, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders & School of Psychology, University of Western Australia

Education

  • 2004 
    University of Western Australia, PhD (Psychology)
  • 1997 
    University of Wollongong, Bachelor of Science (Psychology)

Research Areas

  • Psychology And Cognitive Sciences (17)