Anina Rich

Anina Rich is a Professor at Macquarie University's School of Psychological Sciences and an ARC Future Fellow. She is affiliated with the Performance and Expertise Research Centre and the Perception in Action Research Centre. Her research focuses on sensory processing, particularly selective attention mechanisms and multisensory integration, including synaesthesia studies. She has received numerous awards, including being a finalist in the Australian Museum Eureka Prizes (2001, 2002) and the Australian Postgraduate Award (2001-2004). Her work combines psychophysics, neuroimaging, and cognitive neuroscience to explore attention dynamics and synaesthesia.

Research Interests:
- Selective attention: Balancing voluntary and involuntary attention, applied in medical imaging contexts, sustained attention, and neural underpinnings.
- Multisensory integration: Investigating synaesthesia (e.g., mirror-touch, grapheme-color), exploring how sensory modalities interact.
- Neuroimaging techniques: Using fMRI and MEG to study brain regions involved in attention and perception.

Awards:

• 2001-2004 Australian Postgraduate Award
• 2004 Cognitive Neuroscience Society Graduate Student Award
• 2005 Australian Psychological Society Excellent PhD Thesis Award
• Multiple media engagements on synaesthesia and perception

Grants/Projects:

• Dealing with Distraction: Understanding Recovery After Interruption (2024-2028)
• Improving Inferences from Brain Imaging to Understand Selective Attention (ongoing)
• Magnetic Resonance-Compatible Audio-Visual Stimulus Delivery System (2014-)

Labs/Teams: Active member of the Perception in Action Research Centre and collaborator in the Centre for Elite Performance Expertise and Training (CEPET).