Our cognitive psychologists study how people perceive and operate in the world around them. We explore the way individuals mentally represent their experience and then use these representations to function, bringing their past knowledge and their biases to bear on how they perceive and understand all current events. Perceiving, imagining, thinking, remembering, forming concepts and solving problems – indeed all aspects of people's mental lives – define the domain of cognitive exploration.

Perception as a field of research is one of the oldest and most fundamental disciplines within psychology. We striv to understand how stimuli from the world interact with our sensory systems, forming visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory representations of the world. Research in perception and psychophysics looks to discover the lawful relations between environmental events and subjective experience. The modern study of perception is highly integrative, combining cognitive, behavioural, computational, developmental and neuroscientific approaches.

Current Research Topics

• Attention and divided attention, learning, and memory
• Executive control and crossmodal temporal processing
• Auditory and visual perception, motion perception, and tactile perception
• Perceptual learning and organization
• Visual and cognitive neuroscience
• Social and cultural neuroscience
• Psycholinguistics, stuttering and neural basis of human communication
• Effects of depression on cognition and behaviour

Faculty Members