The Evolutionary Cognition Lab is located on the leafy Ourimbah campus of the University of Newcastle, in the beautiful Central Coast region of NSW, surrounded by bushland, lakes and beaches. ​
There are three main streams of research in the lab:
Social cognition in an evolutionary context.
We are running a number of projects investigating people’s sensitivity to the signals (both static and dynamic) present in other people’s faces (like health, fertility, approachability, attractiveness, etc), and the role played by the judger’s own hormones and individual characteristics in such judgements. This is particularly informed by how early life history and psychopathologies/neurodivergences impact social judgements
The evolution of visuo-spatial sensitivities
This project examines the relationship between an organism’s ecology and its visual and spatial abilities and sensitivities, as a way of understanding how these abilities evolve. We have previously examined the way spatial memory in birds and in humans maps on to natural foraging tasks, and continue to investigate how visual and spatial sensitivities are driven by the kinds of decisions animals (including people) need to make about the world around them
Embodied, Enacted, Embedded, Extended (4E) Perception and Cognition
Much of the research in the lab is conducted from a direct/ecological rather than the typical constructivist/structuralist perspective, including projects investigating interactions between sensory modalities (currently visual and haptic), as well as how environmental and personal (motivational, age, "personailty", etc) factors shape up and dynamically determine perceptual and cognitive actions and performance.
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