research interests
i am currently a teaching postdoctoral fellow with digby elliott in the department of kinesiology at mcmaster university. my research concerns the development of expertise, specifically looking at motor control and skill acquisition in visually-guided reaching movements. i am also a member of the scientific and steering committees for the mcmaster institute for music and the mind.
current research projects include:
- expertise and gender effects on visually-guided movement
- the influence of auditory cues on movement
- expert performance in musicians and athletes
- long term athlete development in fencing
- injuries in fencing
- absolute pitch processing
- electrophysiological measures of auditory processing
- neural mechanisms for sound localization in humans
- music perception
- 'what' versus 'where' processing in the auditory system
- virtual acoustic environments
the big question underlying my doctoral research was how the human brain develops to allow us to break up our complex environment into discrete auditory 'objects' for processing, and then successfully reintegrate all these objects to form an accurate representation of this environment. i studied this through a variety of methods, using primarily behavioural and electrophysiological measures in human infants and adults. my thesis research focussed on sound localisation as a cue for segmenting our environment.
my postdoctoral fellowship is funded through the natural sciences and engineering research council. my doctoral research was funded through the canadian institutes of health research.