Dr Irina Harris PhD (University of Sydney)

Position: Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow

Office: Rm 510, Griffith Taylor Building (A19)
Ph: +61 2 9351 3497
Fax: +61 2 9351 2603
Email:

Postal Address:
School of Psychology
Mungo MacCallum Building (A17)
The University of Sydney
NSW 2006
Australia

 
Visual Cognition Lab

 


Qualifications

  • PhD (Medicine), University of Sydney, 2002.
  • MSc (Clinical Neuropsychology), Macquarie University, 1997.
  • BSc (Hons) (Psychology), University of New South Wales, 1994.


Previous Appointments

2002-2004 ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow, Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney.
2000-2001 Research Associate, Cognitive Neuroscience Sector, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy
1996-1999 Clinical Neuropsychologist, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney.


Research Interests

My research focuses on high-level vision and selective attention, as well as their neural substrates. For example, I am interested in how we recognise objects and how we integrate different visual attributes into a coherent visual percept. I am also interested in how selective attention influences object processing. In my lab, we use a variety of techniques, including behavioural experiments with normal individuals (typically 1st year Psychology students), neuropsychological investigations of patients with brain lesions, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and some forms of brain imaging (e.g. fMRI, MEG).

For more details on specific projects click here
 
 

Representative Publications

  • Hayward WG, Zhou G, Man WF, Harris IM (in press) Repetition blindness for rotated objects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance.
  • Harris IM, Dux PE, Benito CT, Leek EC (2008) Orientation Sensitivity at Different Stages of Object Processing: Evidence from Repetition Priming and Naming. PLoS ONE 3(5): e2256. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002256 [Full Text]
  • Harris IM, Benito CT, Ruzzoli M, Miniussi C (2008) Effects of right parietal transcranial magnetic stimulation on object identification and orientation judgments. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20(5), 916-926 [PDF].
  • Dux PE, Harris IM. (2007) On the failure of distractor inhibition in the attentional blink. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14(4), 723-728 [PDF].
  • Dux PE, Harris IM. (2007) Viewpoint costs occur during consolidation: Evidence from the attentional blink. Cognition, 104(1), 47-58 [PDF].
  • Dux PE, Coltheart V, Harris IM. (2006) On the fate of distractor stimuli in rapid serial visual presentation. Cognition, 99(3), 355-382 [PDF].
  • Harris IM, Dux PE. (2005) Orientation-invariant object recognition: evidence from repetition blindness. Cognition, 95(1), 73-93 [PDF].
  • Harris IM, Miniussi C. (2003) Parietal lobe contribution to mental rotation demonstrated with rTMS. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15(3), 315-323 [PDF].
  • Harris IM, Harris JA, Caine D (2001) Object orientation agnosia: A failure to find the axis? Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 13(6), 800-812 [PDF].
 
Full list of publications
 
 

Research Grants and Awards

2010-2013 ARC Future Fellowship - "Seeing the forest and the trees: Cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the recognition of individual objects and sets" (I.M. Harris) - $674,000.
2008-2010 Research Grants Council of Hong Kong – “Recognizing repeated objects in rapid visual streams” (W.G. Hayward & I.M. Harris) – HK$806,000
2008-2010 ARC Discovery Grant - "The ingredients of conscious identification" (I.M. Harris, S.M. Andrews, W.G. Hayward) - $302,000.
2006 University of Sydney Research & Development Grant - "The role of features and holistic information in object recognition" (CI: I.M. Harris) - $21,000.
2005-2009 ARC Discovery Grant and Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship – “Recognition of rotated objects: paying attention to orientation” (I.M. Harris & M.C. Corballis) - $600,000.
2003-2005 Research Grants Council of Hong Kong – “An investigation of the independence of mental rotation and viewpoint-dependent object recognition” (W.G. Hayward, I. Gauthier, I.M. Harris) - HK$726,500.
2003 Macquarie University Early Career Researcher Grant – “Repetition blindness for rotated objects: insights into the nature of object representations” (I.M. Harris) - $18,200.
2002 Macquarie University Research Grant – “Lateralisation of function in the human brain” (T. Bates & I.M. Harris) - $4,350.
2002–2004 ARC Discovery Grant and Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship – “Recognising the orientation of objects: a combined neuropsychological / eye movement investigation” (I.M. Harris) - $204,000.