I undertook my undergraduate degree in Psychology and Neuroscience at Flinders University. I completed both my Honours (2015) and PhD (2019) in the Forensic and Clinical Cognition Lab. From 2012 – 2020 I worked in the Forensic and Clinical Cognition Lab as the lab manager overseeing administration, programming, website development, and ongoing research projects.

I am interested in perception and visual memory, and particularly the circumstances that lead people to misperceive or misremember complex visual stimuli. Many factors can contribute to visual perception and memory errors, including attention, arousal, and emotional valence. My PhD thesis work focussed on the Boundary Restriction effect, whereby people misremember the periphery of a scene as being less expansive than it actually was. This pattern means that people tend to recall being closer to the scene than they actually were. Boundary Restriction seems to be induced by negative stimuli, but it is not a consistent phenomenon. My thesis work sought to disentangle the incidental factors that often accompany negative stimuli to determine the underlying mechanism of this effect, and revealed that a combination of high arousal and attentional capture are necessary for the effect to occur.

I am now a Lecturer at the University of Adelaide. In my research, I am extending my work on the Boundary Restriction effect. I am currently investigating whether other emotions (e.g., positive arousal; disgust) can also induce the Boundary Restriction effect.