As we enter this new academic year, I'm going to switch this so-called blog to a 'news' feature for the lab. Here is where we will post all good (and bad) news about lab activities, publications, presentations, etc. 

The first bit of good news is that we have 2 (two!) graduate students starting in the lab this semester! Catherine Noseworthy is joining the lab from UPEI in the MA Experimental Psychology program. She will be working on a project examining audiovisual integration in children with and without autism. Annika Beatteay will be continuing to hang about the lab, as she is now enrolled in the PhD Clinical Psychology program (with an NSERC award!). She will continue and expand her work on interactions between mood disorders and audiovisual processing. Looking forward to many years of good work with these two excellent researchers. We also have three Honours students and two independent study students this year - see the "People" page for their information.

Also, some news that slipped through the cracks this Spring - the lab has successfully applied for an NSERC Discovery Grant! I am very excited about this because of the opportunities and the stability it brings, which brings me to the next point: we are recruiting an NSERC-funded grad student (MA and/or PhD) to start in Fall 2021. The ideal candidate would have an interest and/or experience with researching spatial attention within and between sensory modalities. Get in touch with my contact info on the "People" page if you are interested!

Very excited to announce I am starting a new position today as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the University of New Brunswick Saint John. It feels like a lot of work paying off, with a decent contribution of luck as well, but I am very much looking forward to setting up a lab, carrying on with research and teaching, and having more than one year's worth of job security ahead of me!

We have a new paper out today in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, examining the effects of crossmodal congruency, perceptual chunking, and training on the capacity of audiovisual integration.  This paper comprises the last three experiments from my dissertation, along with some additional work done at Mount Allison last year.  As always, it is nice to see the culmination of a lot of hard work in print - a copy of the article can be found here: XHP2017

It was a pleasure to share my research into the psychology of music through two research talks this past month.  First, I presented a talk at the University of Prince Edward Island in March, and earlier this month I gave the same talk at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton.  Very happy to continue making the rounds through the Maritimes, sharing and chatting about research and meeting colleagues at various institutions!

Today I had another opportunity to share my research into the effects of expertise on musical and other cognitive abilities, this time with a colloquium talk in the Department of Psychology at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, NS.  I continue to be very happy that there is so much interest in hearing about this line of research, and with every talk I give on it I am gather more input on my work and developing ideas for further manipulations.  

Many thanks to Dr. Kara Thompson for her organizational assistance, and to everybody from the department for their very warm welcome!

I had a great time today giving a talk in the Sackville Town Hall Chambers for the Tantramar Seniors' College's "Inside the Ivory Tower" lecture series.  It was very nice to have such an engaged and interest audience for my talk on the Psychology of Music, and to discuss things in more detail afterwards.  Thank you to Heather Patterson for the invitation and assistance in setting up the talk.

Excited to give a talk at Dalhousie today on my research into the psychology of music.  I'm very happy that my "side projects" are becoming as exciting as my previous dissertation work, and am looking forward to sharing them with the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience this afternoon.  Three projects in the talk - one published, one being written up, and one still mid-data-collection - now I need to find a new project to keep the pipeline moving!

​Thank you to Ian Weaver, Natalie Rosen, and the rest of the department here for the invitation and for the warm welcome to your campus.

A new paper out today in PLOS ONE, examining the flexibility of the capacity of audiovisual integration and how it is affected by alterations of proactive interference and temporal predictability.  This is the first four (out of seven) experiments from my dissertation, and I am very happy to see it in print.  Many thanks to my former supervisor / now collaborator Dr. Ben Dyson, now at University of Sussex, for all his hard work in making this all happen!

The paper is posted on my Publications page here.

We have a new paper out in ​Neurocase​ today, as a result of a collaboration between researchers at Ryerson University and at BRAMS/Universite de Montreal.  Over 15 months, we worked with a sufferer of congenital amusia in his efforts to improve his singing abilities.  While the results were mixed, with no permanent improvement in singing ability, we did find improvements in rhythmic and metric abilities, as well as temporary singing improvements.  We also find evidence supporting the role of the arcuate fasciculus in musical perception and production abilities.

​The paper is available on the Publications page, or here.

I am very pleased to have been invited to give a talk at Acadia University this afternoon.  I am looking forward to sharing my research on the dynamic capacity of audiovisual integration, as well as meeting members of the department of a fellow Maple League of Universities school.  Thank you to everyone at Acadia for a warm welcome to Wolfville, NS!