معرفی
Professor Mike Nicholls is a full-time faculty member at Flinders University, holding a Strategic Professorship in Psychology within the College of Education, Psychology and Social Work. He is Director of the Brain and Cognition Laboratory and currently serves as Dean of Research for his college. Previously, he was a professor at the University of Melbourne for 17 years.
His educational background includes a BArchSt from the University of Adelaide (1985–1987), a BA (Hons) in Psychology from the University of Adelaide (1998), and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from King’s College, Cambridge (1990–1993), funded by a Cambridge Commonwealth Trust scholarship.
Mike Nicholls’ research is centered on cognitive neuroscience, particularly the study of behavioral and perceptual asymmetries related to brain lateralization. His work investigates handedness, spatial attention in clinical and healthy populations, language, facial expression perception, and the role of eye movements. He explores how attention is controlled by the brain across sensory modalities and spatial dimensions. His recent publications reveal a strong focus on how social context influences perception, body image, facial judgments, and attentional processes, often employing neuroimaging and psychophysical methods.
His 15 most recent articles (2023–1996) span topics including inattentional blindness, social modulation of visual perception, reinforcement learning in visual cortex, and attentional distortions in spatial cognition. These works reflect a consistent interest in the neural and cognitive underpinnings of lateralized behavior and attention, with applications in both healthy and clinical populations.
Scientific Awards:
- Outstanding Academic Mentor Award, Australian Psychological Society (2020)
Mike Nicholls has supervised numerous research students and PhD candidates, with advising interests in laterality, attention, and cognitive neuroscience. He has secured substantial research funding, including multiple ARC Discovery and Linkage Grants, with recent projects focusing on decision aids in complex environments, augmented reality for defense, and attentional asymmetries in navigation. He has also held editorial roles in journals such as Laterality and the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, and currently serves on the ARC's Medical Research Advisory Group.
He leads the Brain and Cognition Laboratory at Flinders University, a research team dedicated to understanding cognitive processes and their neural representations, particularly in the context of brain asymmetry and attentional control.
