Dr Diane Abdallah

Dr Diane Abdallah is a lecturer in Psychology with an interest in various topics in the field: Social, Organisational and Cognitive/Neuropsychology. She completed her PhD in Cognitive/Neuropsychology at Kent under the remote supervision of Dr Joseph Brooks. Diane examined how perceptual input and neural activity affect perception of ambiguous figures such as Rubin’s face-vase illusion or the well-known Necker Cube.

Diane is interested in understanding how we interact with the visual world around us and the mechanisms that underlie our perception. She is also interested in investigating if or how our performance on visual search tasks can implicitly reveal certain political and social attitudes and beliefs we might have.

During her PhD, Diane used psychophysics, ERP (event-related potentials) and multi-variate pattern analysis of EEG, and eye-tracking data, in order to understand the underlying mechanisms behind the perceptual interpretations of ambiguous stimuli and the switching between the different interpretations.

Diane is also interested in investigating the effect of cognitive load and/or work load on collective action in an organisational context.

• PSYC6391: Brain and Cognition Seminars
• PSYC8570: Organisational Psychology: Methods and Statistics
• PSYC8590: Applying Psychology to Organisations: Extended Literature Review

Diane is an Academic Advisor for students and part of the admissions team at the University.

Funding and awards

• 2018-2019 – Postgraduate Research Bursary at the University of Kent
• 2018 – European Conference on Visual Perception Bursary
• 2017-2018 – Postgraduate Research Bursary at the University of Kent

Conference presentations 

• 2019 – Vision Sciences Society - Abdallah, D., Brooks, J.L. (March 2019). Response Dependence of Reversal-Related ERP Components in Ambiguous Figure Perception, St. Pete Beach, FL. 
• 2018 – European Conference on Visual Perception - Abdallah, D., Brooks, J.L. (August, 2018). Task Dependence of Reversal-Related ERP Components in Perception of the Necker lattice, Trieste, Italy.

Publications 

Forthcoming 

• Abdallah, D., Brooks, J.L. (under review). Response dependence of reversal related ERP components in perception of ambiguous figures. Psychophysiology.