RESEARCH INTERESTS AND SUPERVISION

My research focus is on aspects of metacognitive and social influences on children's event memory reports, with application to children's eyewitness testimony. I am currently conducting a research program on social influences on children’s responses to repeated questions, with funding from an ARC Discovery grant, and I am involved in collaborative research with Prof. Claudia Roebers at the University of Bern, Switzerland, on the development of accurate confidence judgments in event memory reports, which has been funded by the German Research Foundation. I also have an interest in individual differences and developmental progression in children’s source monitoring, and have carried out research in collaboration with Dr Roslyn Markham and Dr Sabina Kleitman, developing child measures of imagery vividness across different modalities, and relating these measures to source monitoring for memories of events. My interest in these phenomena lies in the theoretical implications for understanding cognitive development, as well as in the practical implications for developing appropriate methods of questioning children in forensic and other contexts.

I have supervised Honours and Graduate Diploma in Science projects in a range of areas associated with children’s event memory and metacognitive monitoring. Postgraduate research supervised includes developmental aspects of conduct disorder and its relation to PTSD; children's involvement in decision making in family law proceedings; the stability of bullying and victim behaviours across school, university and work place; humour and social skills in children; and predictors of recidivism in juvenile offenders.

GRANTS CURRENTLY HELD

• 2005 – 2007: ARC Discovery grant "Optimising recall in children's testimony: The challenge of repeated questions"
• 2006: (with Dr D. Livesey) University of Sydney Teaching Improvement Fund grant "Development of video footage of children for use in tutorial and WebCT exercises."

PREVIOUS GRANTS AWARDED

• 2004: University of Sydney Sesquicentenary Near Miss Grant: "Optimising recall in children's testimony: The challenge of repeated questions".
• 2003-4: German Research Foundation Grant (with Prof. C. Roebers, University of Wuerzburg): “Developmental progression in children’s metamemorial judgments”
• 1998: ARC Small Grant (with Dr R. Markham): "A developmental study of imagery and source monitoring in three different modalities" .
• 1996: ARC Small Grant (with Dr R. Markham): "The development of reality monitoring in visual, auditory and audio-visual tasks".
• 1996/7: University of Sydney Research Grant: "Developmental trends in appropriate "don't know" responses in eyewitness memory".
• 1995: University of Sydney Research Grant: "Children's eyewitness testimony: The effects of age and instructions on "don't know" responses to answerable and unanswerable questions".