Person & Emotion Perception Lab (PEPLab)

Location: 1.10-1.12 Psychology

Phone: 6488 3636

  • Our 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; neuropsychological studies of people with brain injuries affecting face identity recognition and expression recognition; and investigations into psychopathology affecting person perception.

Our research to date has addressed five main questions:

  1. What is the role of visual attention in face perception?
  2. How do we recognise facial emotion and regulate social behaviour?
  3. Why can't some children and adults recognise facial identity? (see Prosopagnosia Research link for more details)
  4. Discovering what underlies individual variability in the ability to recognise facial identity and facial expression in typical individuals.
  5. Understanding how face perception skills develop in children. See SciFace for kids project.

See Publications for more details.

The PEPLab is associated with the facelab and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders.

Our research is supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC DP110100850; DP140101743; and ARC Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders CE110001021) and the University of Western Australia.

Follow the Person Perception Program of the Centre on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PersonPercept

ARC CCD Person Perception Node in Perth 2014