Research

I'm interested in perception and attention, mainly within two distinct areas: face-processing and driving. My interests in face-processing include the following issues. What information do we extract from faces in order to recognise them? How do we manage to judge the age of unfamiliar faces so well, and how do we recognise familiar faces despite the changes produced by ageing? What's the basis of the "own-group" biases that exist in face recognition? As well as these theoretical problems, I'm also interested in more "applied" aspects of face processing, suich as how to improve the quality of the facial composites such as E-Fit that are used by the police to catch criminals, and how "own-group" biases (such as the "other-race effect", known to be a significant factor in eyewitness misidentifications) affect face recognition. I'm currently collaborating with Sarah Laurence (University of Keele) and Graham Pike and Gini Harrison (Open University) on research on these topics.

My research on driving focuses on the attentional and perceptual problems associated with driving: what information do drivers use in order to detect other road-users, and how is this affected by mobile phones and other distractions? Driving places great demands on perceptual processing: the speed at which vehicles travel means that object-recognition (and decisions based on it) has to be performed uner considerable time pressure. I am particularly interested in the perceptual strategies that people use in order to cope: one idea that I have explored is that drivers might use "shorthand codes" as substitutes for more elaborated perceptual representations. (for example at junctions, drivers might look for headlights instead of motorcycles, if they have learnt that motorcyclists usually use their headlights). These days, I'm particularly interested in how hazard perception by drivers is impaired by using mobile phones, and I work closely with Gemma Briggs (Open University) on research in this field.