Faculty
Aaron P. Johnson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Psychology
Prof. Johnson has been at Concordia since 2006. His research investigates human vision in real-world environments while performing real-world tasks. His research spans a range of areas from low-level computational models of vision, to applied research in the fields of marketing, aviation, and low vision rehabilitation.
Rick Gurnsey, Ph.D.
Professor, Psychology
Prof. Gurnsey has been a professor at Concordia since 1992. His research focuses on vision across the visual field, and on improving statistical analysis used in the field of Psychology. He has recently published a new textbook on Statistics for Research in Psychology , which focuses on confidence interval estimations.
Lucia Farisello, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Psychology
Dr. Farisello has been at Concordia since 2014. Her research investigates psychophysiological and self-report measures of arousal to visually explicit sexual imagery and videos. She is also developing better self-report questionnaires to explore sexuality and arousal.
Walter Wittich, Ph.D.
Affiliate Professor, Psychology / Assistant Professor, Optometry and Vision Science.
Prof. Wittich has been at the University of Montreal since 2014. His research investigates dual sensory impairments (e.g., vision and hearing loss), and how these may impact other areas of older adults health (e.g., Cognition).
Visual Impairment Research Lab @ UdM
Postdoctoral Fellows
Caitlin Murphy, PH.D.
Postdoc, Psychology
Dr. Murphy started at Concordia in 2017. Her research investigates the physiology of the retina in individuals with visual impairment using the Scanning Laser Opthamoloscope imaging modality. Her research is building a database of images of individuals with visual impairment, with behavioural and cognitive measures, allowing both researchers and clinicians to better understand how vision loss impacts other areas of health.
Leon Franzen, PH.D.
Postdoc, Psychology / JMSB
Dr. Franzen is a horizon postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Johnson and Prof. Grohmann (JMSB). His doctoral research at the University of Glasgow investigated the perceptual mechanisms involved in Dyslexia. At Concordia, he will be working on visual marketing behaviour.
Graduate Students
Elliott Morrice, MA.
PhD Candidate (Clinical & Research Option), Psychology
Elliott’s research investigates if (and how) visual impairment impacts measures of cognitive assessment. He aims to develop substitute measures for commonly used cognitive assessments that can be performed without vision. More information
Maria Santaguida.
PhD Candidate (Research Option), Psychology
Maria’s research investigates the acute effects of alcohol on individuals’ subjective and psychophysiological responses to visual sexual stimuli, using eye-tracking, genital thermography, and self-report measures. More information
Simon Dubé.
PhD Candidate (Research Option), Psychology
Simon’s research investigates how individuals’ psychophysiological and subjective responses to sexual stimuli relates to their sexual preferences using eye-tracking, EEG, genital thermography, and self-report questionnaires. His research is also interested in the emergence of new interactive/immersive sexual technologies (e.g., sociosexual artificial intelligence/robotics, virtual/augmented sexual reality). More information
Karine Elalouf
MA Candidate (Research Option), Psychology
Karine’s research investigates how self-report measures of arousal correlate with eye movements and heart-rate variability measures while watching erotic videos.
She is also interested in how arousal can change our decision making, and uses the delayed discounting paradigm to explore this.
Arash Sharma
MSc Candidate, JMSB
Arash’s research investigates behavioural economics, and how visual cues impact our decisions to part with money. He is particularly interested in how charitable donations are influenced by the visual cues in the advertisement.
Sam Clement-Coulson
MA Candidate (Research Option), Psychology
Sam’s research investigates human factors involved in aviation. He is interested in pilot training and the layout of the aviation flight deck (e.g., instrumentation). More information
Brandon Huard
MSc Candidate, JMSB
t.b.c
Undergraduate Students
Corina Lacombe
Honours, Psychology / Research Coordinator
Corina’s research investigates how scene perception impacts anxiety using psychophysics and EEG/heart-rate/eye-tracking.
She is also interested in using psychophysiological measures to assess self-reported stigma towards low vision assistive devices.
Zoey Stark
Honours, Psychology
Zoey’s research investigates how different font types (e.g., OpenDyslexic, Times New Roman) impacts reading performance in a Dyslexic population. She uses eye tracking to observe if the different fonts lead to changes in the characteristics of the eye movements.
Stephanie Pietrangelo
Honours, Psychology
Stephanie’s research is linking the Drusen present in the retina of individuals with low vision with their cognitive abilities. Longitudinal research has demonstrated that individuals with Drusen are up to four times more likely to develop dementia and Alzheimer’s disease compared to age-matched older adults. Her research will investigate this at the level of the individual.
Aude Rouisse
Honours, Psychology
Aude’s research investigates how the location of Drusen on the retina predicts difficulties in visual tasks for individuals with low vision.
Alexandra Connor
Honours, Psychology
Alexandra’s research is interested in how arousal, specifically inducing a “hot state” can change our decision making, and uses the delayed discounting paradigm to explore this.
Austin Trudeau
Honours, Psychology
Sophie Hallot
Undergraduate, Psychology
Sophie’s work investigates the impact of call quality on a video conference application using self-report measures and eye tracking.
Alumni
Mathew Martin
MA (Research Option), Psychology
Matt’s MA thesis investigated how summary statistics are impacted by splitting attention across multiple visual features (e.g., size, orientation, colour).
Julie Shilhan
Ph.D. (Clinical and Research Option), Psychology
Julie’s PhD thesis investigated the development of the a sexual Stroop task to psychophysically measure arousal in men and women.
Bruno Richard
MA & Ph.D. (Research Option), Psychology
Bruno’s PhD thesis investigated the mechanisms involved in the detection of manipulations in broadband spatial frequency contrast in images containing natural scene statistical relationships.
John Brand
Ph.D. (Research Option), Psychology
John’s PhD thesis investigated the impact that attention has on rapid scene perception (i.e., scene gist).
Florian Grond
Postdoc, Psychology
Florian’s research investigated the development and use of a mobile-phone friendly audio beacon for navigating around an indoor shopping mall.
Afroditi Panagapoulos
M.A. & Ph.D. (Research Option), Psychology
Afroditi’s PhD thesis explored how the splitting of attention impacts task performance.
Angela Vavassis
M.A. & Ph.D. (Research Option), Psychology
Undergraduate Thesis Students (and thesis topic)
2018-2019
Corina Lacombe Anxiety Natural Scenes
Alexandra Connor Arousal Decision Making
Zoey Stark Dyslexia reading
Aude Rouisse Retina scan visual function Continuing.
Stephanie Pietrangelo Retina scan cognitive function Continuing.
2017-2018
Brandon Huard Driving Simulator
Austin Trudeau Delayed Discounting
Sarah Raimi Digital Pegboard Low Vision
2016-2017
Julien Hughes Cognitive Screen Low Vision
2015-2016
Lauren Gazzard Eye movement arousal
Julien Rice EEG Scenes
Joella Martire Low vision SLO-OCT
Saida Adisa Hearing and assistive device.
Arash Sharma Eye movement marketing MSc, JMSB, Concordia
2014-2015
Sarah Rassi Low vision shopping
Jake Applebaum Eye movement arousal
Yvette Essess Hybrid Search
Jessica Wilson Low vision iPad
Karine Elalouf Eye movement variability in video
2013-2014
Michelle Bauer Sex arousal
Cassandra Fehr Colour Scene Processing
Marie-Eve Leclerc Sex arousal
Christina Nadon Low vision iPad
Anna Sotnikova Low vision iPad
2012-2013
Charlie Ohayon Scene Processing
Dara Heather tDSC Vision
2010-2011
Johnathan Greggain Scene perception and attention
Heather Woods-Fry Macular Degeneration
Ata Hatami Rapid scene perception
2009-2010
Dmitre Novikov Eye movement magic
James Graves Perceptual Learning
2008-2009
Bruno Richard Concussion
Vanessa Doyon-Cadieux Macular Degeneration
Sylvie Labertie Leaning tower illusion
2007-2008
Sylvie Labertie Perception of Art
David Derry Contrast Natural Scenes
Anthony Paventi Properties fixated Scenes
Jessica Zang Colour Scene Recognition
Germaine Lam Amplitude discrimination
