Doctor Rachel Robbins
RESEARCH LECTURER,
Social, Personal & Developmental Psychology (SoSSP
Personal
Qualifications
- PhD The Australian National University
- Bsc The Australian National University
UWS Organisational Unit (School / Division)
- Social, Personal & Developmental Psychology (SoSSP
Contact
| Email: | R.Robbins@uws.edu.au |
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| Extension: | On Leave |
| Mobile: | |
| Location: | 24.G.26 Bankstown |
| Website: |
Biography
My general interest is in how experience and development change the way we see the world. I approach this question from mamny different angles, for example by comparing experts to non-experts, by looking at changes across development and by training people with specific sets of stimuli. Most of my work involves recognition of human faces, so how we tell who someone is. I also study response to human bodies, and other stimuli including dogs and houses!
I was awarded my PhD in 2005 from the Australian National University. My Supervisor was A/Prof. Elinor McKone and my topic was the role of experience on face and object recognition. (This included testing dog-experts for how they recognise dogs and faces!) I spent 2005 teaching at the University of Canberra and then took a teaching/research post-doc at McMaster University in Canada. For 2006-2007 I worked with Profs Daphne Maurer and Terri Lewis on visual development and the effects of early deprivation on face and object recognition (including navigation). In 2008 I returned to Australia to take up a 2-year position at the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science (MACCS), Macquarie University, with Prof Max Coltheart investigating person recognition more generally. I also started setting up collaborations to study early visual deprivation due to congenital cataract and face recognition difficulties (prosopagnosia) in Australia. In 2010 I started as a Research Lecture at UWS in the School of Psychology with links to MARCS.
This information has been contributed by Doctor Robbins.
Teaching
Previous Teaching Areas
- 101541 Advanced Topics in Psychology, 2012
Publications
Chapters in Books
- McKone, E. and Robbins, R. (2009), 'Are faces special?', The Handbook of Face Perception, Oxford University Press .
- Robbins, R., Rhodes, G., Jaquet, E., McKone, E., Jeffery, L. and Clifford, C. (2005), 'Adaptation and face perception - How aftereffects implicate norm based coding of faces', Advances in Visual Cognition, Volume 3. Fitting the mind to the world: Adaptation and after-effects in High-level vision, Oxford University Press 9780198529699.
Journal Articles
- Robbins, R., Maurer, D., Hatry, A., Anzures, G. and Mondloch, C. (2012), 'Effects of normal and abnormal visual experience on the development of opposing aftereffects for upright and inverted faces', Developmental Science, 10.
- Robbins, R. and Coltheart, M. (2012), 'The effects of inversion and familiarity on face versus body due to person recognition', Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 7.
- Robbins, R. and Coltheart, M. (2012), 'Left-right holistic integration of human bodies', The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 13.
- Robbins, R. and Coltheart, M. (2012), 'The effects of inversion and familiarity on face versus body cues to person recognition', Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 7.
- Robbins, R., Maurer, D., Hatry, A., Anzures, G. and Mondloch, C. (2012), 'Effects of normal and abnormal visual experience on the development of opposing aftereffects for upright and inverted faces', Developmental Science, 10.
- Robbins, R. and Coltheart, M. (2012), 'Left-right holistic integration of human bodies', Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 13.
- Piepers, D. and Robbins, R. (2012), 'A review and clarification of the terms 'holistic', 'configural', and 'relational' in the face perception literature', Frontiers in Psychology, 11.
- Robbins, R., Shergill, Y., Maurer, D. and Lewis, T. (2011), 'Development of sensitivity to spacing versus feature changes in pictures of houses: Evidence for slow development of a general spacing detection mechanism?', Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 12.
- Mondloch, C., Robbins, R. and Maurer, D. (2010), 'Discrimination of facial features by adults, 10-year-olds, and cataract-reversal patients', Perception, 11.
- Robbins, R., Nishimura, M., Mondloch, C., Lewis, T. and Maurer, D. (2010), 'Deficits in sensitivity to spacing after early visual deprivation in humans: A comparison of human faces, monkey faces, and houses', Developmental Psychobiology, 7.
- Robbins, R. and McKone, E. (2007), 'No face-like processing for objects-of-expertise in three behavioural tasks', Cognition, 46.
- Robbins, R., McKone, E. and Edwards, M. (2007), 'Aftereffects for face attributes with different natural variability: adaptor position effects and neural models', Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 23.
- McKone, E. and Robbins, R. (2007), 'The evidence rejects the expertise hypothesis: Reply to Gauthier & Bukach', Cognition, 6.
- Robbins, R. and McKone, E. (2003), 'Can holistic processing develop with practice?', Cognition, 29.
Research
- Face Recognition
- Object recognition
- Sensitive periods in visual development
This information has been contributed by Doctor Robbins.
Supervision
Doctor Robbins is available to be a principal supervisor for doctoral projects
Current Supervision
| Title: | Memory for Human Movement: Behavioural and Neural Mechanisms in Action Recollection |
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| Field of Research: | |
| Title: | Facial Processing in a more Naturalistic Context: What Impact does the use of Dynamic Facial Stimuli have on Holistic Processing? |
| Field of Research: |
Previous Supervision
| Title: | The Role of Familiarity and Movement in Face Recognition |
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| Field of Research: | AUDIO VISUAL STUDIES |
| Thesis: | The Role of Familiarity and Movement in Face Recognition |
Media
| Title: | How Zaddie become a ridiculously photogenic guy |
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| Description: | Comment on attractiveness |
| Title: | Eye colour and trust |
| Description: | Comment on Cosmos Article |
