Isabelle Mareschal

Professor Isabelle Mareschal serves as Professor of Visual Cognition and Director of Research at the School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences, Queen Mary University of London. She leads research at the Centre for Brain and Behaviour, focusing on visual perception and social neuroscience. Her work bridges experimental psychology with real-world applications, particularly in understanding how humans process visual information and social cues.

Her research spans two primary streams: extending controlled measurements of visual perception (psychophysics) to realistic stimuli and situations, and investigating social neuroscience and person perception. She examines how humans detect visual features and make judgments about others' attention and facial expressions, with particular emphasis on populations who have experienced adversity. Her lab employs behavioral, psychophysical, and eye-tracking methodologies to explore emotion, gaze, social interaction, and global health implications.

Analysis of her recent publications reveals a strong trend toward research on refugee populations, war trauma effects, and cross-cultural emotion perception. Her work increasingly integrates computational approaches, including genetic algorithms and hidden Markov models, to understand individual differences in visual processing. There's also a growing focus on climate change impacts on mental health and educational interventions for vulnerable populations.

Professor Mareschal has secured substantial research funding from diverse sources including EPSRC, MRC, Leverhulme Trust, and British Academy. Her grants often address mental health in humanitarian crises, early childhood trauma effects, and innovative methods for studying visual cognition.

She actively supervises PhD students including Danni Gu, Sophie Heer, Karen Hoang, and Alexandra Perkins, with research projects spanning contextual information in adaptation and loneliness effects on vision. Her laboratory work at Queen Mary University of London integrates multiple methodologies to advance understanding of visual cognition in both typical and adversity-affected populations.