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Louisa is a final-year PhD candidate in the Research School of Psychology. In 2015, she completed a Bachelor of Science (Psychology) (Hons I). Her PhD research examines the mechanisms and perceptual consequences of attentional shifts, and she is supervised by A/Prof Mark Edwards, Dr Stephanie Goodhew, and Dr Amy Dawel.

Our visual environment is complex, dynamic, and abundant. One way our visual system makes sense of this environment is by relying on shifts of covert attention (i.e., “looking out of the corner of one’s eye”) to select certain elements of our visual world for preferential processing; these shifts of attention are guided by a range of stimuli, both social (e.g., gaze direction) and nonsocial (e.g., arrows) in nature. The aim of this thesis is to examine the mechanisms that drive attentional shifts elicited by social and nonsocial cues, as well as the consequences of these shifts for visual perception. In the first series of studies, the mechanisms driving attentional shifts were examined: specifically, the extent to which attentional shifts in response to social and nonsocial cues rely on cognitive resources; whether levels of social anxiety affect attentional orienting in response to gaze; and whether a simple motion signal is sufficient to produce a shift of attention. Turning to the perceptual consequences of attentional shifts, this thesis then examined the controversial claims that attention can harm our ability to perceive events unfolding over time, and that it does not affect how we perceive collections of stimuli. The results of this thesis shed light on the factors driving shifts of attention, and challenge existing claims surrounding its perceptual effects.