I joined the Psychology team in 2021 as the Senior Technician. I provide support for experimental design, coding and data analysis as-well as running the Psychology laboratory. Prior to this I was in the University of Edinburgh and taught experimental programming. I am particularly interested in how new technology can help students become effective researchers and expand the scope of research. In terms of teaching approaches, I emphasise coding as a scientific practise and focus on stimuli generation and experimental procedures rather than a more traditional programming approach.
I achieved my PhD in visual Psychophysics in the University of St Andrews; as-well as an MSc in Acoustics and Music Technology and a BSc (Hons) Astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh. I have an extensive background in Mathematics, Programming, Scientific Theory, as-well as Scientific Methodology. I am particularly open to using this background for the development of novel procedures and inter-disciplinary work. I have several research interests. In vision my previous experiments were centred on early to mid-level vision. I have long standing interests in the fields of cross-modality, visual ecology (camouflage and cross-species perception) and broader theoretical issues. In addition, I have an Arts Practise and as such have an interest in the Psychology of Creativity, Drawing, and Problem solving.
My research identified a previously unknown perceptual mechanism whereby the perceptual organisation of a target gaborized contour integrates shape-level information from adjacent objects across the visual field (Gillespie and Vishwanath, 2019: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2019.02.002). I am presently working on a follow up paper and in the future, plan to fully characterise the integrative field that leads to this activity.
I am involved in more inter-disciplinary theoretical work which explores the relationship between Psychophysics, Neuroscience, Communication, and Phenomenology. This includes understanding the codification of the ‘perceptual mechanism’ as-well and communicating the implications of Perceptual Psychology for other fields. Most recently I have written a chapter on the implications of human perception and visual ecology communication across cultures and species (e.g., ‘deep-time’ Comms and METI/SETI). This will be published in 2022.