Professor Sally Andrews

	Professor Sally Andrews PhD (University of NSW)
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Research Interests:

My research is based in cognitive psychology but integrates theories and methods from the domains of computer science, philosophy and neuroscience – the fields that define the discipline of cognitive science. As an individual researcher, and in collaboration with students and researchers from a range of disciplines, I have used a variety of methodologies to investigate how both healthy individuals and people suffering from psychiatric disorders attend to and analyse words and sentences.

The central focus of my research has been on lexical processing and its relationship to reading skill: how do skilled language users represent and retrieve their knowledge about the words; how do these cognitive capabilities develop; and how does lexical processing contribute to reading skill. My research has focused primarily on English, but I have also collaborated in research projects comparing speakers of different languages to determine how the characteristics of different writing systems, and their relationship to phonology and semantics, influences language processing.

External Research Funding

Australian Research Council

The effects of similarity between words on lexical access: Implications for models of visual word recognition. 1990-2: $98,535
Models of visual word recognition: Distinguishing between localised and distributed representations. 1993-5: $100,600
The role of attention in visual word recognition. 1996-8: $102,000
Defining the perceptual unit for reading: The role of subsyllabic segmentation in visual word identification. 1999-2001: $107,500
Testing detailed models of word identification: Decision and response contributions to performance. (Andrews & Heathcote) 2000-2002: $103,500
Lexical retrieval and reading comprehension : Binding perceptual, lexical and conceptual information in on-line reading. 2003-2005: $165,000
Training for adaptability: The role of errors, exceptions and rules of thumb (Hesketh, B. Neal, A. Andrews, S et al.) ARC Linkage grant, 2004-2007: $673,500
Enabling Human Communication (Dale, R. ,Burnham, D. Andrews, S. et al.) ARC Network Grant 2004-2008: $2,000,000
Lexical expertise and reading skill: An experimental analysis of individual differences in written language proficiency. 2006-2008: $202,500
The ingredients of conscious identification. (Harris, I. Andrews, S. & Hayward, W). 2008-2010 $302,000

National Health and Medical Research Council

• Brain potential indices of pre-attentive processes in schizophrenia. (McConaghy, Catts, Andrews & Ward) 1990-1992: $196,668
• Thought disorder in normal and psychotic populations. (McConaghy, Catts, Andrews & Ward) 1991: $40,000
• Neuroanatomical correlates of ERP abnormalities in schizophrenia. (Ward, Catts, Andrews & Michie) 1992-4: $235,612
• Development of a Psychosis Observational Rating Scale (Catts, McConaghy, Andrews & Bird). 1995-7: $223,255

Current Funded Projects:

Testing detailed models of word identification: Decision and response contributions to performance.
(Australian Research Council, Project A10007174)

This project is a collaboration with Andrew Heathcote from the University of Newcastle that is intended to provide more sophisticated information about the processes underlying standard word identification tasks than the traditional measures of mean reaction time (RT) and error rate. Using Heathcote’s RTSYS analysis package, we have estimated and compared the reaction time distributions obtained in a variety of lexical decision and naming tasks. This more refined performance data provides a basis for testing fine-grained predictions of theories of lexical retrieval that cannot be discriminated on the basis of mean RT alone. Application of RT distribution methodologies also provides the basis for evaluating the contribution of decision processes to word identification tasks. The final stages of the project will attempt to fit our RT data using extensions of the diffusion and leaky integrator models of perceptual decision-making. This generalisation of models applied in a variety of perceptual domains provides a framework for integrating current detailed computational models of lexical retrieval with more general accounts of perceptual and cognitive processing.

Lexical retrieval & reading comprehension: Binding perceptual, lexical & conceptual information in on-line reading.
(Australian Research Council, Project DP0345724)

Reading is a complex process that involves integrating sensory information extracted from text with stored memories about word meanings, syntactic structures and general knowledge. Much reading research has focused on the processing of isolated words, but normal reading requires integration processes that are not necessary to recognise single words. This research uses tasks requiring sentence comprehension and measures of eye movements during reading to investigate how readers retrieve and combine information while reading to comprehend text. In particular, the research is using the phenomenon of “repetition blindness” to investigate the interactions between perceptual and conceptual levels of processing in sentence comprehension.