Visual Cognition

Our research

Our research focuses on understanding how our eyes and brain provide us with information about the world that we can use to recognize and interact with objects, environments and people. We are interested in visual perception from the most basic level (e.g., how we discriminate different shades of colour) to the most complex (e.g., face and object recognition).

To provide this understanding, we use techniques, such as eye-tracking (which allows us to track where participants are looking), EEG-ERP (to measure participants’ brain activity while viewing certain stimuli, such as faces and other objects), and classical behavioral (e.g., remembering faces) and psychophysical paradigms.

Current Projects

• Other race effect in Malaysian population: Malaysia is a country with a multi-ethnic background. In our lab, we are exploring whether this multi-ethnic exposure affects the ability of people to recognize faces of different ethnicities.
• Effect of quantitative eye movements on face processing task: how many times do we have to look at a face to extract different information, such as gender, familiarity and emotional status?
• Self-face recognition: how do we know that one particular face is our own? Do we process our own face qualitatively and quantitatively differently to other faces?
• Featural and holistic processing in face processing: what is the relationship between these processes and face processing tasks?
• Face and object expertise: does visual experience with an object shape the way we process that object?
• Mathematical cognition: what are the cognitive mechanisms involved in solving arithmetic problems?
• Texture perception: how do we distinguish objects purely by virtue of their texture properties?

• Visual illusions in Malaysia: do different cultural groups see visual illusions to different extents?

Collaborators

• Dr Alejandro Estudillo, Bournemouth University
• Professor Frederick Kingdom, Department of Ophthalmology, McGill University
• Dr Umar Toseeb, Department of Psychology, Manchester Metropolitan University
• Dr Ian Stephen, Department of Psychology, Macquarie University
• Dr Lee Ai-Suan, Department of Psychology, Sunway University