Research for Department of Psychology

Faculty Research Interests

Psychology

Faculty members are happy to involve undergraduate students in their research projects, using state-of-the-art facilities and equipment, often collaborating with other departments, community members and employers on research projects. That gives you the opportunity to get additional hands-on experience. 

Senior undergraduate students may have the unique opportunity to work with faculty and graduate students in research labs to get an up-close and personal view of Psychology in action. In addition to on-campus research facilities, Psychology researchers have carried out studies in South Africa, Japan, Samoa, Bonaire and China, often with the help of student assistants.

What we study
Louise Barrett (PhD, University College London) 
  • The evolution and development of social cognition in human and non-human primates, embodied and distributed cognition, ecology and evolution of primate sociality, including sexual conflict, parental investment and maternal effects
Shichen Fang (PhD, University of Alberta) 
  • Psychosocial development in the transition to adulthood, including adolescent and young adult mental health, well-being, adjustment, and intergenerational relationships

Peter Henzi (PhD, Natal) 
  • The evolution and development of social cognition in human and non-human primates, embodied and distributed cognition, ecology and evolution of primate sociality, including sexual conflict, parental investment and maternal effects
Jean-Baptiste Leca (University Louis Pasteur) 
  • Intergroup behavioural variation in nonhuman primates, behavioural innovation and traditions, social learning, cultural behaviours, adaptive and non-adaptive behaviours, Developmental, mechanistic, functional, and phylogenetic approaches to primate behaviour

Fangfang Li (PhD, Ohio State University) 
  • Child speech development, acoustic phonetics, cross-language comparison of fricatives
     
Jamal Mansour (PhD, Queen's University) 
  • Eyewitness identification and confidence including lineup construction and fairness, the weapon focus effect, postdicting identification accuracy (e.g., individual differences, decision processes, confidence), collecting and interpreting confidence judgments; friendly fire; face recognition 
     
David Logue (PhD, Colorado State University) 
  • Animal communication, bioacoustics, individual differences.

Jennifer Mather (PhD, Brandeis) 
  • Behaviour of octopuses, eye movement in schizophrenics, Alzheimer's disease

Javid Sadr (PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) 
  • Object and person perspective, neural mechanisms of high-level vision, face and biological-motion processing, motor control and learning
     
Paul Vasey (PhD, Université de Montréal) 
  • Animal Behaviour and Cognition, primate neuroanatomy, human evolution, evolutionary psychology, sexuality and gender
 
Robert Williams (PhD, McMaster) Associate Member 
  • Gambling social and economic impacts of gambling, risk taking and its utility, internet gambling, the cross-cultural meaning of gambling, behavioural/psychological patterns of stock market players, and all aspects of problem gambling (assessment, etiology, prevention, and treatment)]; assessment, etiology and treatment of addiction and mental health problems