Dr Linda Jeffery

BA(Hons), PhD (UWA)

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

telephone   +61 8 6488 3096

email    linda@psy.uwa.edu.au

Research interests
My research focuses on how we process faces. Faces are rich in social information and our ability to extract this information at a mere glance is crucial to human social interaction. Faces help us determine an individual’s identity, sex, ethnicity and attractiveness, as well as providing insights into how people are feeling and what they are attending to. 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.

Trying to understand the mechanisms underlying an ability that we usually take for granted is fascinating in its own right and may also provide insights how such processes break down, as in autism. I am currently investigating the role of adaptive coding mechanisms, which are revealed by face aftereffects, in face perception. My particular focus is on determining how these mechanisms mature in children.  In addition I am also interested in individual differences in face perception skills and whether they are related to other underlying abilities, such as empathy and general cognitive ability.

Grants
2007-2010 “The Role of Adaptive Coding Mechanisms in the Development of Face Perception” (in collaboration with Gill Rhodes (UWA), Elinor McKone (ANU), Daphne Maurer (McMaster University, Canada) & Liz Pellicano (Bristol University, UK), Australian Research Council, $374 000 AUD

Recent Papers
Jeffery, L., Rhodes, G., & Busey, T. (2007). Broadly tuned, view-specific coding of face shape: Opposing figural aftereffects can be induced in different views. Vision Research, in press.

Nishimura, M., Maurer, D., Jeffery, L., Pellicano, E., Rhodes, G. (2007). Fitting the child's mind to the world: Adaptive norm-based coding of facial identity in 8-year-olds.  Developmental Science, in press.

Rhodes, G., & Jeffery, L. (2007). The Thatcher Illusion: Now you see it, now you don’t. Perception, in press.

Pellicano, E., Jeffery, L., Burr, D. & Rhodes, G. (2007). Abnormal adaptive face-coding mechanisms in children with autism spectrum disorder. Current Biology, 17, 1508-1512.

Rhodes, G., Jeffery, L., Clifford, C. W.G., & Leopold, D.A. (2007). The timecourse of higher-level face aftereffects. Vision Research, 47, 2291-2296.

Jeffery, L., Rhodes, G., & Busey, T. (2006). View-Specific Coding of Face Shape. Psychological Science, 17, 501-505.

Leopold, D. A., Rhodes, G., Müller, K.-M., & Jeffery, L. (2005). The dynamics of visual adaptation to faces. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 272, 897-904.

Rhodes, G., Halberstadt, J., Jeffery, L., & Palermo, R. (2005). The attractiveness of average faces is not a generalised mere exposure effect. Social Cognition, 23, 205-217.

Rhodes, G., Lee, K., Palermo, R., Weiss, M., Yoshikawa, S., Clissa, P., Williams, T., Peters, M., Winkler, C., Jeffery, L. (2005). Attractiveness of Own-race, Other-race and Mixed-race Faces. Perception, 34, 319-340.

Rhodes, G., Jeffery, L., Watson, T. L., Jaquet, E., Winkler, C., & Clifford, C. W. (2004). Orientation-contingent face aftereffects and implications for face-coding mechanisms. Current Biology, 14, 2119-2123.

Rhodes, G., Jeffery, L., Watson, T. L., Clifford, C. W. G., & Nakayama, K. (2003). Fitting the mind to the world: Face adaptation and attractiveness aftereffects. Psychological Science, 14, 558-566.

Book Chapter
Rhodes, G., Robbins, R., Jaquet, E., McKone, E., Jeffery, L., & Clifford, C. W. (2005). Adaptation and face perception: How aftereffects implicate norm-based coding in faces. In C. W. G. Clifford & G. Rhodes (Eds.), Fitting the mind to the world: Adaptation and aftereffects in high-level vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press.