It is not always possible for staff to agree to supervise all students who wish to work with them. The main reason for this is the desire of staff to ensure that all students get appropriately intensive supervision.

If staff has too many students, all the students suffer. For this reason we recommend that you contemplate topics from more than one staff member in the early phases of discussion.

To speak with any staff members about potential supervision, please email them for an appointment or follow any specific directions they have provided below.

Students should note that not all of the following staff will be available in a particular year.

W/Professor David Badcock
The way we see determines how we are able to interact with the environment. The focus of my research is on human visual performance. My current research examines both the contribution of early visual pathways to individual tasks and the extent to which common neural and perceptual processes are involved in motion, pattern and position coding. The processes are investigated using both normal and clinical groups of observers. Currently the laboratory group is running long term projects examining how humans perceive both the speed and direction of the type of motion produced by moving through the environment, the processes that allow us to determine the location of objects within the environment, the processes that help us to detect and group large scale structure in the visual world and also one aiming to determine the nature of the long-lasting changes that arise as a consequence of migraine headaches. I also have a collaborative project with Murray Maybery on visual processing in Autism.

Dr Donna Bayliss
Working memory is an active memory system that is closely linked with educational achievement in children and also a range of cognitive abilities in adults including reasoning ability and fluid intelligence. It has also been implicated in a number of developmental disorders such as ADHD.

• Current projects include:
• Memory consolidation. This refers to the process of transferring a fragile perceptual representation into a more stable memory representation. While the time-course of this memory consolidation has been mapped in adults, little has been done to examine this process in children. I am interested in examining the developmental trends in memory consolidation and the relationship between individual differences in memory consolidation and measures of working memory and general ability.
  
  Goal maintenance and Stroop interference. Stroop interference has often been used as a ‘gold standard’ measure of inhibition. However, recent evidence suggests that Stroop interference may actually be dually determined by the processes of inhibition and goal maintenance, which is the ability to maintain the task goal. Over the last few years, I have been investigating this theory in children, young adults and older adults.
  
• Sleep and cognitive performance. A relationship between sleep quality and academic achievement has been established, however, the causal mechanisms underlying this relationship are far from clear. In collaboration with Professor Romola Bucks, we have begun investigating potential mediators of this relationship in children.
  
• Working memory training. I am also interested in developing a working memory training program for use with a range of developmental disorders known to have problems with working memory. This project would suit a Postgraduate student interested in cognitive development and educational achievement.Interested students should email me (donna.bayliss@uwa.edu.au) to arrange a time to discuss specific projects further. 

Asst/Professor Uta Bindl
Emotion regulation at work. There is an opportunity for 1-2 honours students to write their theses on the topic of how employees regulate
their emotions at work, including what impact these emotion regulation strategies have with regards well-being and performance outcomes. One honours thesis will mainly focus on identifying and validating different emotion strategies at work (via interviews and surveys). The second thesis will focus on a dynamic investigation of emotion regulation with well-being and performance outcomes at work, using an experience sampling methods design. Organizational access for data collection has been secured. Co-supervisor will be Professor Mark Griffin.

Honours students must have a co-supervision arrangement with a School of Psychology staff member.

Dr Romola Bucks
My research addresses aspects of how age and disease affect our cognitive and emotional skills. I work with people who have short term conditions, such as a cold, or those with longer term changes in ability either as a result of normal ageing or of degenerative conditions such as Obstructive Sleep Apnoea and Parkinson’s.

Projects that I will offer for 2012 are:

• Prospective memory and sleep.
  Prospective memory is remembering to remember (e.g. to take your pills, or post a letter when you pass the postbox). Prospective memory appears to worsen as we age. Sleep appears to worsen as we age, and poor sleep is related to poorer retrospective memory performance. This project will explore the relationship between sleep quantity and quality and prospective memory performance.
  
• Theory of mind in Parkinson’s.
  Individuals with Parkinson’s have marked motor deficits and develop cognitive problems early in the disease process, including executive dysfunction. This study will explore the relationship between executive function and theory of mind in Parkinson’s.
  
  Rumination in ageing
  There is epidemiological evidence that anxiety and depression reduce in general as people. One reason for this may be a reduction in unhelpful depressive rumination with age. This study will explore this hypothesis. A DPsych thesis might also consider the relationship between rumination and sleep in ageing.
• Interested students should email me to arrange a time to discuss specific projects further. Please note, studies which involve the recruitment or testing of older adults or individuals with neurodegenerative disorders can be more demanding of students. It is helpful if you have relevant clinical or life experience of working with these populations.

Associate Professor Sue Byrne
My research interests lie in the field of clinical psychology. I have a particular interest in eating and weight disorders and I have a strong background in both research and clinical work in this area. My current research includes major projects which aim to identify causal pathways to eating disorders and obesity, and to test new treatments for these disorders.My research team provides evidence-based psychological treatment for eating and weight disorders in children, adolescents and adults. Honours projects I have supervised in the past have included those focusing on psychosocial consequences of obesity in children and adolescents, binge eating and other eating disorder psychopathology in children and adolescents, testing various causal models of bulimia nervosa, outcomes of group cognitive-behavioural therapy for obesity in adults, the role of the media in the development of disordered eating, the relationship between fast food consumption and mental health, body image in males, predictors of drop out from treatment for eating disorders and the relationship between obesity and depression in children, adolescents and adults.

 Dr Patrick Clarke
Models of anxiety disorders consistently implicate the role of low-level information processing biases in the development and maintenance of psychological dysfunction. These models particularly emphasise the roles of selective attention for threatening information and negative resolutions of ambiguity. Current research carried out by our Cognition and Emotion Research group, within the School of Psychology’s Centre for the Advancement of Research on Emotion, uses cognitive-experimental paradigms to examine the role of these information processing biases, and focuses on several related questions including: Which particular attentional and interpretive biases govern the expression of these emotions? How do the biases associated with emotional vulnerability change across the lifespan? How and why does the readiness with which individuals acquire certain patterns if information processing biases serve to predict changes in their anxiety vulnerability across time? Which particular forms of processing selectivity characterise heightened, rather than compromised, levels of emotional resilience? To what extent can these biased patterns of processing selectivity be intentionally controlled, and does restricted cognitive control capability elevate emotional vulnerability. How can an understanding of selective attention and interpretation assist people to act in an adaptive way when faced with potential threat? An overarching issue that pervades much of this work concerns identifying which cognitive biases causally contribute to which facets of emotional vulnerability. To address this issue we seek to determine how various manifestations of emotional vulnerability are influenced by directly manipulating differing aspects of selective information processing.

Mr Patrick Dunlop
My current research interests lie in the following two areas:

The use of psychometric assessments, such as cognitive ability tests and personality questionnaires, in the context of personnel selection.  Within this broad domain, I am very interested in understanding the socially desirable responding or 'faking' that is thought to occur when people undertake personality tests in high-stakes settings, such as when applying for a job.   I am also currently interested in exploring 'retesting effects', which describe the impact of repeated exposure to psychometric tests on performance.  Lastly, although testing technology advances quickly (e.g. unproctored internet tests and computer-adaptive testing), there remain many unanswered research questions relating to the use of these new tests in practice, which I am interested in exploring.  Those interested in working within these areas should consider co-supervision with Professor David Morrison.

Understanding the processes of decision making when people are in stressful situations. In particular, I wish to explore the manner in which individuals interpret and focus on the information they receive during emergency situations. At present, I am undertaking this research in the context of bush fire emergencies, in a research position funded by the Bushfire CRC.  As a second project in this area, I am also interested in exploring the factors that predict community members’ preparedness for disasters.  Those interested in working within these areas should consider co-supervision with Dr Illy McNeill or Professor David Morrison.

I can be contacted on patrick.dunlop@uwa.edu.au or 6488 3958 to discuss potential research supervision. 

Dr Ullrich Ecker
My research interests lie in the field of memory, in particular:

Interference and consolidation accounts of forgetting: Neuroscience has postulated a special neural process called “consolidation” that supposedly protects memory traces from forgetting. In contrast, cognitive models of memory explain forgetting with reference to interference and (temporal) distinctiveness. My research is currently contrasting predictions from these two traditions of memory research, including: 

• What are the effects of mental inactivity and context changes before and after learning?
  
• How does the similarity of interfering material affect memory? 

Memory updating and the continued influence of outdated misinformation: When people are given a piece of information (e.g., John is guilty) but are then told that this information is incorrect (i.e., John is innocent), they will to a certain degree continue to refer to John’s guilt in their reasoning. I am currently investigating a number of factors that influence this failure of memory updating, including pre-existing attitudes, personality traits, and the effects of repetition. Potential projects include:

• How do personality traits influence memory updating? E.g. is depression associated with difficulties to remove negative information from memory
  
• How do people process news articles when the headline mismatches the text?
  
• Does the trustworthiness and attractiveness of faces affect memory updating of face-role associations (e.g., J-killer, J-nanny)
  
• One applied topic is to design the “ideal” correction of misinformation. How can you most effectively debunk a myth?

Feature binding in memory (in collaboration with Murray Maybery). Different parts of the brain process and store different aspects of information (e.g., the colour and shape of an object) and this information needs to be bound to allow for coherent perception and memory. Experiments in this area would look at memory for such bindings, and how it is influenced by factors such as feature discriminability or prototypicality of colours.

 Associate Professor Nicolas Fay
My research investigates human communication, a fundamental aspect of everyday life: whether giving a speech, chatting with a neighbour or participating in a management discussion. Current projects include:

• Language evolution. Because language arose in our prehistoric past it’s impossible to study language origin. To overcome this we have people play a communication game (think of Pictionary or Charades) where they must communicate without relying on their pre-existing language system (forcing them to create a new communication system from scratch). This approach allows us to identify the factors important to language origin and evolution.
  
• Anxiety. With Prof Page and Prof MacLeod I’m investigating the communication of anxious persons. This includes contrasting the perceived communication efficacy of socially anxious and non-anxious persons, and studying the interpretation and production biases (i.e., their tendency to interpret and produce ambiguous information in a negative way) of persons with a generalized anxiety disorder.

Dr Allison Fox

My research interests include examination of the timing and neural substrates of psychological processes with neuroimaging techniques, such as the event-related potential (ERP). These techniques are used to further understanding of both normal and impaired functioning.

ERPs can provide valuable additional information about how people process stimuli, particularly in cases where overt behavioural responses cannot be reliably obtained.

Projects currently underway include investigation of the long-term effects of aging, development, and substance abuse on cognitive functioning, as well as delineation of the nature of the processes contributing to error-monitoring, inhibition, memory, and perception using ERPs.

Research topics might include performance monitoring and maturation of auditory temporal processing, and I can be contacted on allison.fox@uwa.edu.au or 0439 945 784 to discuss potential research supervision.

Associate Professor Gilles Gignac

My areas of research revolve around personality, intelligence, and assessment. In the past, I have conducted research more focally in the areas of intelligence and emotional intelligence, however, more recently, I have been researching the area of individual differences in humour appreciation. Project topics may change from year to year, however, they will almost invariably be relevant to the area of individual differences.

W/Professor Mark Griffin
My research examines the way organizational contexts shape and are shaped by individual work performance and attitudes. Research is often conducted in collaboration with organisations and, from 2012, will involve the new Accelerated Learning Laboratory.

Current topics and research questions include:

Leadership
How do leaders balance demands for both innovation and accountability, or for both risk and safety? How do organisations speed up leadership development so that individuals with high potential are capable of moving to complex leadership roles more quickly?

• Safety innovation
  What factors lead individuals to generate new ideas, speak up about safety, and think ahead to anticipate future safety needs? How can organisations support this kind of safety innovation and create a positive and innovative safety culture?
  
• Employee well-being and performance
  How does employee well-being and engagement translate influence better organizational performance? What organizational practices reduce work-stress and enhance engagement in the short term and the long term?

W/Professor Geoff Hammond
Projects are available in the following two research areas:
Projects in psychoacoustics will examine the effects of gaps in otherwise continuous background noise on the size of the eye blink reflex in people who suffer from tinnitus (the 'phantom' perception of sound in the absence of auditory stimulation) and the effects of visual cues on detection of near-threshold sounds. These projects will be co-supervised by either Helmy Mulders or Don Robertson from the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology.

• Projects in voluntary movement will examine processes in motor cortex that control voluntary movement. These projects will use either transcranial magnetic stimulation to stimulate motor cortex or transcranial direct current stimulation to change the excitability of motor cortex or other cortical areas.  

Dr Linda Jeffery
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 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 have a particular interest in determining how the mechanisms of face perception mature in children but also supervise projects working with adult participants.

I am interested in:

•  how we integrate information provided by different cues in the face (e.g. eye-gaze direction and facial expression) and how other bodily cues interact with facial cues (e.g. facial expression and vocal expression

• studying whether individual differences in face perception skills are related to other underlying abilities, such as empathy, autism-like traits and general cognitive ability

•  using face aftereffects to probe the mechanisms underlying face perception in adults and children  

  W/Professor Carmen Lawrence
  My time in politics made me very aware of the need to translate psychological research into public policy.  As a result, I am interested in examining the forces that drive behavioural change in areas such as climate change, conservation, energy and water use and emergency preparedness and how such findings can be applied to effect large scale social change. I am participating in several projects which may be of interest to students, including the application of normative social feedback in city offices and in households to achieve reductions in energy consumption; community perceptions of climate change and the characteristics of communities which are important in predicting preparation for bushfires and other emergencies. I am also supervising projects on the effects of stereotyping and the effects of  inequality within nations on environmental degradation.

Interested students should contact me on ext3015 or via e-mail – carmen.lawrence@uwa.edu.au 

 W/Professor Stephan Lewandowsky
Have you ever wondered why you forget a stranger’s name within seconds of them being introduced to you? Are you interested in how we become expert at classifying stimuli (e.g., X-rays) into categories (e.g., healthy or abnormal)? Have you ever wondered why so many people continue to believe stuff that’s quite obviously false (e.g., that President Obama was not born in Hawaii)?
If so, you might be interested in the research currently being pursued in the Cognitive Science Laboratory:

• Memory updating and skepticism. When you are told that the moon is made of green cheese, and later on someone tells you it’s actually a dead rock, what will you actually remember? When you are told by a politician that climate science is “crap”, and you then read 10,000 scientific papers that converge on the opposite conclusion, how will your skepticism affect what you believe? And what is the difference between skepticism and denial, anyhow?
  
•  Working memory and categorization. Working Memory (WM) is considered to be the "engine of cognition"; a flexible system dedicated to the processing of information and its retention for brief intervals. Accordingly, WM capacity predicts many high-level cognitive abilities, e.g. reasoning or reading. But does it also predict how people learn to categorize objects? And if so, why and how?
  
• How come you can remember the name of your favourite Year 1 teacher but you cannot remember the name of a potential employer to whom you were introduced a minute ago? What are the processes that drive forgetting of some information but leave other information intact?

I can be contacted on stephan.lewandowsky@uwa.edu.au or 6488 3231 to discuss potential research supervision.

Associate Professor Shayne Loft
I have several areas of cognitive and applied cognitive (human factors) research that are suitable for honours and masters projects. For PhD students, please arrange to see Shayne to talk about research possibilities. Shayne has PhD scholarships available for PhD students to start in 2012 or 2013. Further details of Shayne’s research can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/uwashayneloft.
Email (Shayne.Loft@uwa.edu.au) or call Shayne anytime (08) 6488 4610 to discuss any of the honours, masters or PhD research possibilities below.

• Prospective Memory (PhD Scholarships available for PhD starting 2012 or 2013)
  How do we remember to perform actions in the future?
  Failure to perform intended actions is the most common form of everyday human error. For example, we may make a mental note to attend a meeting, or phone friends about weekend activities, yet fail to remember to do so. Usually such failures are merely annoying. However, in workplace settings such as healthcare and air traffic control they can be fatal. This research aims to build an understanding of the cognitive processes that support prospective memory.
  
• Relative Judgment (PhD Scholarships available for PhD starting 2012 or 2013)
  This project aims to better understand the interaction between memory and attention when individuals need to predict the future relative positions of moving objects on radar display screens, such as in air traffic control, naval radar tracking, piloting and train control. The approach here is to observe performance in complex work systems (aviation, military, medicine) and take these insights back into the laboratory, bringing them under control. This work can sometimes involve the use of eye tracking.
  
• Situation Awareness (PhD Scholarships available for PhD starting 2012 or 2013)
  Shayne has an ongoing research agreement with Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO (Australian Navy) to run simulations in the UWA laboratory that mimic submarine control room activities. The focus of the research is to examine how individuals maintain adequate awareness of their task environment in order to perform tasks effectively, and how display technology can be designed to increase that performance.
  
• Some other research areas of interest include Workload, Fatigue, Training, Decision-Making, Individual Differences, and Task Automation. (PhD Scholarships available for PhD starting 2012 or 2013)

Asst Professor Alexsandra Luksyte
My research interests revolve around two areas: 1) overqualification and 2) diversity in the workplace.

• Overqualification:
  The effects of overqualification on employee performance, voluntary turnover, and well-being as well as processes underlying these linkages and boundary conditions under which overqualified employees are either happy, productive, and loyal to the organization or unhappy, counterproductive, and voluntarily quit their jobs. I am also interested in examining overqualification in different populations and organizational strategies to minimize negative consequences and maximize positive outcomes (e.g., creativity) of overqualification.
• Diversity in the workplace:
  The effects of social markers (e.g., race, gender, age, obesity, etc.) on decision-making (e.g., advice taking, performance appraisal, promotion, etc.) and employee performance and well-being. 

Honours students must have a co-supervision arrangement with a School of Psychology staff member.

W/Professor Colin Macleod

Clinical theorists have attributed emotional disorders to cognitive idiosyncrasies, while cognitive theorists have developed models which suggest that emotional states will be associated with pervasive information processing biases throughout the cognitive system. Both clinical and cognitive models predict the existence of processing biases favouring emotionally congruent information in attention and interpretation. Current research carried out by our Cognition and Emotion Research group, within the School of Psychology’s Centre for the Advancement of Research on Emotion, uses cognitive-experimental paradigms to test such hypotheses, and focuses on several related questions including: Which particular attentional and interpretive biases govern the expression of these biases? How do the biases associated with emotional vulnerability change across the lifespan? Which particular forms of processing selectivity characterise heightened, rather than compromised, levels of emotional resilience? To what extent can these biased patterns of processing selectivity be intentionally controlled, and does restricted cognitive control capability elevate emotional vulnerability. An overarching issue that pervades much of this work concerns identifying which cognitive biases causally contribute to which facets of emotional vulnerability. To address this issue we seek to determine how various manifestations of emotional vulnerability are influenced by directly manipulating differing aspects of selective information processing. Much of our work involves collaborations with research colleagues at other international universities, which at present include Harvard, Oxford, and the Universities of London, Ghent, Amsterdam, Exeter, Virginia & California.

Professor Murray Maybery
Three areas of possible research projects are as follows.

• Autism It is typically not feasible in the Honours year to test children with autism, but it is possible to conduct viable projects with samples of adults who score in the extremes on a questionnaire that assess mild autistic traits. Our recent work has been investigating both strengths (e.g. superior visual skills) and weaknesses (e.g. limited use of inner speech) associated with autism. We are also investigating the claim that extreme prenatal exposure to testosterone contributes to the disorder.
• Schizophrenia and auditory hallucinations
  Again, rather than work with patients, it is more feasible for Honours students to test groups of adults in the general population who differ on dimensions of schizotypy. Our work has been investigating primarily the cognitive and affective bases of auditory hallucinations.
• Working Memory
  Here our current work is focused on memory for the multiple features of events, such as the “what”, “who”, and “where” of speech. Contrary to many current models of working memory, we have been able to demonstrate that these features are remembered in integrated form rather than as discrete features. Impairments in binding together the features of events have been linked to disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. Students interested in these areas should initially contact me by email indicating which area or areas are of interest. I will then arrange either individual or small-group meetings.

Neil McLean
My research interests span a range of areas within clinical psychology and human performance. Particular areas of interest include insomnia and the factors that influence sleep; attitudes towards psychological disorders such as depression and the impact of attitudes on help seeking; the impact of perfectionism on performance in sport and performing arts; the nature of ADHD and the validity of ADHD diagnosis; and the cognitive processes and social/cultural factors underlying disorders of appetite.
I am also interested in the factors the inhibit people from adopting and maintaining exercise and the psychological and cognitive benefits of exercise

Dr Illy McNeill
I have two main areas of research that are suitable for honours projects. The first of these projects may be co-supervised by Mr Patrick Dunlop.

• Competing (Bushfire) Goals and Information Processing
  When bushfires occur many people tend to have competing goals. They want to save their property by defending, but they also want to save themselves and/or family members by evacuating early. Research on goals and information processing has shown that people are more likely to attend to information that they perceive as serving their active goal. For example, people who aim to save their house during a fire may attend to fire direction information but ignore road closure information. But what if their active goal switches and they have been ignoring information that would have been relevant for this new goal? Can it still be retrieved? And how can we frame information so that it is processed even if it is not relevant for the active goal at the time? These questions will be answered in a range of experimental studies, and perhaps tested in field studies too. This line of research is carried out as part of the UWA collaboration with the Bushfire CRC (http://www.psychology.uwa.edu.au/research/bushfire). 
  
• Retaliating against the Environment
  When a person gets harmed by another, they may feel the need to retaliate. So what about getting harmed by the environment? People curse at the weather, and appear to take things personal when they say things like ‘And of course, it only started to rain when I left the door!’ So does being harmed by (extreme) weather events influence whether or not we do things that benefit versus harm the environment? If so, what psychological processes mediate this influence, and how can they be changed? This research stream will focus on answering the above questions in experimental studies with a variety of manipulations and measures.

I can be contacted on ilona.mcneill@uwa.edu.au or 6488 4856 to discuss potential research supervision.
For PhD opportunities, please visit http://www.psychology.uwa.edu.au/research/bushfire/studentopportunities

Dr Lies Notebaert
Models of anxiety disorders consistently implicate the role of low-level information processing biases in the development and maintenance of psychological dysfunction. These models particularly emphasise the roles of selective attention for threatening information and negative resolutions of ambiguity. Current research carried out by our Cognition and Emotion Research group, within the School of Psychology’s Centre for the Advancement of Research on Emotion, uses cognitive-experimental paradigms to examine the role of these information processing biases, and focuses on several related questions including: Which particular attentional and interpretive biases govern the expression of these emotions? How do the biases associated with emotional vulnerability change across the lifespan? How and why does the readiness with which individuals acquire certain patterns if information processing biases serve to predict changes in their anxiety vulnerability across time? Which particular forms of processing selectivity characterise heightened, rather than compromised, levels of emotional resilience? To what extent can these biased patterns of processing selectivity be intentionally controlled, and does restricted cognitive control capability elevate emotional vulnerability. How can an understanding of selective attention and interpretation assist people to act in an adaptive way when faced with potential threat? An overarching issue that pervades much of this work concerns identifying which cognitive biases causally contribute to which facets of emotional vulnerability. To address this issue we seek to determine how various manifestations of emotional vulnerability are influenced by directly manipulating differing aspects of selective information processing. In collaboration with the Bushfire CRC, a particularly pertinent research question concerns how this relation between emotional vulnerability and selective information processing contributes to adaptive or maladaptive behaviour when facing a chronic threat.

Professor Andrew Page
My interests concern clinical psychology, but specifically the disorders of anxiety and depression. I aim to improve treatments by understanding how therapies bring about their effects and the nature of the clinical conditions. Specific research questions include:

• What thought processes cause psychological problems and how can we change them?
• What is the nature and best treatment of phobias?
• How does exposure to feared stimuli reduce anxiety?
• How can we encourage clinical psychologists to make science-informed decisions?
• I am also involved in a number of hospital-based research projects and the social phobia research and treatment program, run from the Clinical Psychology Unit at UWA. 

Professor Sharon Parker
I am an organizational psychologist and have supervised many PhD students and honours students over the years. Ilustrative research interests include: job design, proactivity, innovation, creativity, employee self-efficacy, and organisational change. See Website: https://sites.google.com/site/profsharonparker/. I have potential projects in 2011 in these topics as part of the Accelerated LearninI am an organizational psychologist and have supervised many PhD students and honours students over the years. Ilustrative research interests include: job design, proactivity, innovation, creativity, employee self-efficacy, and organisational change. See Website: https://sites.google.com/site/profsharonparker/. I have potential projects in 2011 in these topics as part of the Accelerated Learning Laboratory (with Professor Griffin & Dr Uta Bindl), or more applied projects in organisations. Contact sharon.parker@uwa.edu.au.

Honours students must have a co-supervision arrangement with a School of Psychology staff member.

Associate Professor Romina Palermo
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?
Please see the Person and Emotion Perception Lab (PEPLab) website (https://sites.google.com/site/drrominapalermo/) for more details.  

W/Professor Gillian Rhodes
Faces convey a wealth of information that guides our social interactions. At a glance we can assess a person’s identity, gender, ethnicity, age, attractiveness, emotional state and focus of attention. This fluency is remarkable given the difficulty of the discriminations required. We aim to understand the mechanisms (perceptual, cognitive, neural and evolutionary) of person perception and how they relate to other cognitive abilities and social functioning. A major focus is on how person perception skills emerge during typical development and in children with the neuro-developmental disorders of autism and developmental prosopagnosia. Our long-term goal is to develop interventions to enhance person perception, and ultimately, social functioning and quality of life in individuals with person perception difficulties. Our work is conducted in the FaceLab, which is part of a national Center of Excellence in the Study of Cognition and its Disorders
. 

Dr Werner Stritzke
Current research focuses on the development of a model of craving applicable to a broad range of appetitive behaviours including addictions and eating disorders. Specifically, the role of ambivalence in understanding and treating excessive appetites is emphasised.

• Projects may include:
• laboratory experiments examining reactivity to appetitive cues
• surveys investigating affective and motivational aspects of abstinence or restraint
• studies of the processes involved in children’s evolving attitudes and decisions about substance use and non-use
• More recently, I am also interested in applying the ambivalence framework to the understanding of the suicidal mind using both explicit and implicit measures with the aim to improve assessment and intervention for suicide risk
  

Associate Professor Troy Visser
Information processing is surprisingly limited.  That is why we often have trouble focusing on driving while talking on the phone, or studying while others are watching television or playing a video game.  Because we can only process a limited amount of information, the role of selection processes - mechanisms that choose what we will attend to - have a huge role in all facets of our behaviour and conscious awareness.  My research involves studying how selection is accomplished by the brain and the implications of these processes for areas such as perception, awareness, social behaviour and mental health.

In the Learning, Attention and Behaviour Lab, we use combinations of behavioural testing, online survey data, and computer-based simulation to study human information processing.  The focus of our lab is on studying the relationship between selection and human behaviour to understand a variety of phenomena from the areas of perceptual, cognitive, social, and clinical psychology.  Current projects include: a) investigating whether computer-based training can make people less distractible and increase cognitive control; b) the mechanisms underlying "cognitive distraction" that occurs when we are lost in thought and thus fail to perceive key perceptual information; c) the effects of mental-health diagnoses on stigmas towards adults and youth; d) the role of group membership in co-operative behaviour with others.

This is a broad field with the opportunity for projects to be conducted in many areas of interest within psychology.  My goal is to work cooperatively with students to create an honours project that is of interest to both of us and executed in a supportive, goal-oriented, collegial environment.

Dr Michael Weinborn
My current research interests are focused on prospective memory functions in healthy aging, as well as in a number of clinical groups (e.g., individuals with substance abuse and depression).  A particular interest is the linkage of laboratory measures of prospective memory and other executive functions to aspects of day-to-day functions, including medication management.  Additionally, assessment of symptom validity in neuropsychological assessment is an ongoing research interest.

Specific projects likely for next year include:

• evaluation of aspects of prospective memory in healthy aging, depressed and high-risk alcohol using groups;
• assessment of the effects of induced alcohol craving on laboratory measures of decision making and risk taking in individuals with high reward sensitivity; and
  evaluation of cognitive load manipulations in the assessment of neuropsychological symptom validity tests. 
  I can be contacted at Michael.weinborn@uwa.edu.au or 6488 1739 to discuss potential research supervision.