Justin Gaetano is a PhD candidate and university medallist under the supervision of
Dr. Anna Brooks and A/Prof. Rick van der Zwan, co-directors of the Laboratory of
Cognitive Neuroscience and Behaviour (CNaB), SCU. Justin was awarded a 1st class Bachelor
of Psychology with Honours degree in 2011, which has led to publishable research. 

Broadly speaking, Justin's area of research interest is "other person
perception": the study of how the human nervous system processes multisensory and
multicategorical data to produce coherent representations of other human agents. Of
specific interest are potential pan-stimulus correlates of the ability to discriminate
sex and other socially relevant characteristics - key signals of personhood which human
observers detect with alternating amounts of sensitivity and bias. In the context of
CNaB, a major goal of this research is to inform models of the neural mechanisms
undergirding person processing.

Book Chapters

Perceiving other people on the basis of categorical multisensory data: towards a unified theory of person perception (with Rick van der Zwan and Anna Brooks), Current trends in experimental and applied psychology (2012)

Perceiving others as distinct agents is a skill crucial to human social interaction, yet no...