We're interested in the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms involved in face perception. How faces are perceived from the very earliest time point, how processing might depend on a face's configuration, or our familiarity with a particular identity, and how face processing abilities differ across individuals. We recruit developmental prosopagnosics - people who find it extremely difficult to extract someone's identity from their face - to explore how and where face processing mechanisms are different from to those who recognise faces easily. 

We explore how emotional expressions are processed, particularly whether emotional face processing is fast and efficient, including the extent to which emotional expressions are processed outside of conscious awareness, and how our perception of emotional expressions is affected by context. We are also interested in how expression and identity information interact when perceiving a face, especially when the identity is unfamiliar. 

We are interested in how multiple agents are perceived, when viewed from a third-person perspective, and under what conditions they are perceived as social interactions. We use both explicit and implicit measures of visual perception to establish whether specific mechanisms are applied to process social interactions, including whether they are processed holistically and prioritised in attention and awareness. We have recently been awarded a Leverhulme Trust grant to investigate the processing of emotional interactions in virtual reality.