Welcome to my personal website!  

        I am a fifth year graduate student in the Neuroscience and Behavior Program at the University of Georgia.  I received a Bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Arizona in the spring of 2005, and a Master's degree in psychology from the University of Georgia in the spring of 2008. My Master's Thesis, entitled "Perception of facial expressions: How humans rate and respond to monkey and human facial expressions" can be found here.  
        I am interested in the development of social perception, including facial identity and expression recognition.  I am interested in species-specific processing mechanisms, as well as within-species individual differences in emotion perception.  A number of studies have documented sex differences in emotion perception.  For example, we recently published a paper in Brain Research.  
        We are currently conducting a study in collaboration with Dr. Dorothy Fragaszy's Primate Cognition and Behavior Laboratory and Dr. Janet Frick's UGA Infant Research Laboratory, in which we are looking at facial identity discrimination and facial expression perception in infants (6-month-olds and 9-month-olds) and adults.  We are interested in whether infants' abilities to recognize faces varies, depending on the species they are viewing (human, monkey, or sheep), and how this changes across the lifespan.
           An additional study is underway in which we are examining dogs' abilties to use human emotional expressions to guide their behavior in ambiguous situations.