Person perception expertise is critical to guiding everyday social interactions and is highly developed in adults. Subtle cues to identity, gender, ethnicity, age, attractiveness, emotional state and focus of attention are effortlessly read from the face in particular. Yet all faces are remarkably similar as visual patterns, so we rely on very subtle differences and variations between them to make all these judgements.

My research focuses on how we process faces and bodies and how individual differences in our person perception skills are related to psychosocial functioning. I am also interested in how we form impressions of character from faces and how these impressions may guide our behaviour. I have a particular focus in determining how the mechanisms of person perception mature in children.

Trying to understand the mechanisms underlying an ability we usually take for granted is fascinating in its own right and may also provide insights into perceptual and social functioning in autistic individuals, for example.  Understanding expertise in person recognition is also important in many contexts where person identification is critical, such a legal settings or border control.

I have worked in a variety of research focussed roles in the School of Psychological Science at UWA.   From 2007-2010 I was an Australian Research Council (ARC) Postdoctoral Fellow, working on a grant investigating the role of adaptive coding mechanisms in the development of face perception.  From 2015-2018 I was an Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD).  

Since 2019 I have been a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychological Science (SPS) at UWA, in a teaching and research position.  In 2020 I was the Chair of the SPS Community and Engagement Committtee.