I'm currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Laboratory for Attention and Social Cognition run by Dr. Jelena Ristic at McGill University.

One line of my research examines how perceiving another person's facial features (e.g. eyes, nose, mouth) can impact socioemotional processes that facilitate social interactions. In particular, I am looking at how these processes may be impacted by face feature occlusion, like in the case of face masks, which occlude the mouth and nose. My goal is to understand how masks impact social interactions and provide strategies to improve masked communication.

Another line of my research examines factors that impact gaze cuing, the phenomenon where we spontaneously orient our attention towards where others are looking.  Not only am I interested in factors that modulate gaze cuing, but also in how gaze cuing impacts other facets of cognition like temporal perception.

Finally, I have begun exploring the impact of editing face features in social media posts. This includes investigating whether we make different personal attributions about others if we know they've edited their photos or not.

Check out more research going on in the lab here!

I completed my Masters and Doctoral research in the Face Processing and Social Cognition Lab, run by Dr. Roxane Itier at the University of Waterloo. My research used eye-tracking and electroencephalography (EEG) to answer questions about how gaze direction influences that way we perceive and respond to faces.

My Masters research investigated how the situational context in which we view faces interacts with their eye-gaze to modulate face processing.

My Ph.D. research characterized the link between eye-gaze, theory of mind and empathy. I also developed a separate line of research examining how gaze and emotional expressions interact to orient an observer’s attention to a gazed-at location.

Check out current research from this lab here!