Emma Stewart

Dr. Emma Stewart is a Lecturer in Psychology at Queen Mary University of London, within the School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences. She leads research in the Centre for Brain and Behaviour, focusing on visual perception and eye movement control.

Her educational background includes undergraduate degrees in Psychology, Law, and French, followed by a PhD in Psychology from The University of Adelaide in Australia under Prof Anna Ma-Wyatt. She completed postdoctoral research at the University of Marburg with Prof Alexander Schutz and later led an independent research program at JLU Giessen funded by the German Research Council (DFG).

Dr. Stewart's research investigates how humans perceive the visual world and make eye movements to guide decisions and actions. Her work combines behavioral and psychophysical methods with eye-tracking, computational modeling, reaching tasks, computer graphics, and statistical modeling. Her primary research areas include:

• Oculomotor planning and gaze control
• Interactions between peripheral and central vision
• Perceptual inference from object properties
• Development of visual stability across saccades
• Mental rotation and 3D object perception
• How past visual experience shapes perception and action

Analysis of Dr. Stewart's recent publications (2019-2024) reveals a consistent focus on transsaccadic perception, object viewpoint processing, and the integration of visual information across eye movements. Her work spans multiple disciplines including vision science, cognitive psychology, and computational neuroscience, with particular emphasis on understanding how humans maintain visual stability despite making 2-3 eye movements per second. Recent work has explored how object properties influence eye movement planning and how humans mentally rotate objects using 2D optical flow processing rather than true 3D rotation.

Dr. Stewart was awarded a grant from the German Research Council (DFG) in 2021 to lead her own research program at JLU Giessen, where she investigated how inferences from physical object properties influence eye movements.

Her research has been supported by various grants, including DFG funding that enabled her to establish and lead an independent research program in Germany prior to joining Queen Mary University of London in December 2023. She collaborates extensively with researchers across institutions, particularly with Prof Roland Fleming at JLU Giessen and Prof Alexander Schutz at the University of Marburg.

Dr. Stewart leads the Stewart Lab at Queen Mary University, which focuses on transsaccadic perception, 3D object perception, saccade sampling and information uptake, past history and prediction in visual processing, and inferences from objects. Her lab employs behavioral and psychophysical techniques coupled with eye-tracking and computational modeling to investigate fundamental questions about visual perception and eye movement control.