Major Research Areas

Cognition and Perception:
Faculty members are Professor Terry Au, Dr Anthony Hayes, Dr William Hayward, Dr Sieu Khuu, Dr Joanna Kidd, Dr Li Li, Dr Hongjing Lu and Professor John Spinks. We have broad, overlapping areas of expertise in a range of topics covering visual perception, cognition, memory, and cognitive development. A variety of approaches are adopted, including traditional psychophysics, psychophysiology, brain imaging, and computational modelling. Specific research topics include spatial vision, motion processing, stereoscopic depth perception, visuomotor control, face and object recognition, attention, development of conceptual knowledge, and Bayesian approaches to perception and cognition.

Clinical Psychology:
Faculty members are Professor Tatia Lee, Dr Samuel Ho, Dr Frendi Li and Dr Connie Poon.  We have a broad research expertise covering different areas in clinical psychology in both adult and child populations.  Research areas of particular interest to us are diagnosis and assessment of psychopathology; efficacy of psychological treatments; traumatology; neuropsychology including the study of neuroplasticity and brain mechanisms for regulation of cognition and emotion; health psychology including psychopathology due to general medical condition, death and bereavement; and health cognition such as social-cognitive processes of health-related judgments and decisions.

Educational Psychology:
Faculty members in this area are Professor Connie Ho, Dr Irene Ho Dr. Chi-ming Kam and Dr Shui-fong Lam. They have research interest in teaching and learning (literacy acquisition, instructional strategies, curriculum development, mathematics learning, psycholinguistics); social emotional development of children (moral development, achievement motivation, development of emotional and social competence, risk and protective mechanisms in family and peer ecologies); special education ( developmental dyslexia, learning disabilities; autism); teacher development (teacher efficacy, teacher education); and school-based interventions (thinking skills development, prevention of childhood aggression and depression, enhancement of achievement motivation).

Social Psychology:
Faculty members are Dr Fiona Chan, Dr Cecilia Cheng and Dr Harry Hui. Research interests include social cognitive processes underlying personality coherence, and the effect of language on social cognition, intergroup perception, attitude formation, and interpersonal interaction; indigenous social psychology and the study of the Chinese self; applied aspects of social and organisational psychology: the study of attitudes, beliefs, aptitudes, and abilities of the work force and their relevance to human resources management in the Chinese context; organisational stress.