Prof Catriona Havard

Professional biography

I am a Professor of Psychology in the School of Psychology and Counselling, FASS. I am an applied Cognitive Psychologist, using mainly experimental quantitative research methods. I have been at the Open University since 2011. 

Research interests

The main and continuing theme of my research is in the area of face recognition. One strand of this research is in the applied area of eyewitness identification from lineups and also the biases people make when trying to match or recognise faces.  I have worked on projects investigating how children, adolescents and older adults make identifications, as these are groups that often perform poorly in these tasks, and have looked at ways to improve their performance.  I've also investigated other factors that influence face identification, such as the own-age and own-race bias, and length of delay between viewing an event and subsequent identification. The eyewitness research has led to the development of new techniques to try and reduce the false identification rates that can lead to wrongful convictions.  Click here for a short film about that research.

I am currently one of the Co-Directors of the Open Psychology Research Centre (OPRC)  where I work with the other Co-Director Gini Harrison and our Director of Research Sarah Crafter. I am also part of the  Forensic Cognition Research Group where I work closely with Sarah Laurence, Lara Frumkin, Graham Pike,  Hayley Ness, Ailsa Strathie Jim Turner, and Zoe Walkington. I am a member of and the Harm Evidence and Research Collaborative (HERC) and a member of the Centre of Police Research and Learning.

Teaching interests

Since joining the OU in 2011,  I have been involved with a number of different modules such as Introducing  the Social Sciences (DD102), Investigating Psychology 1 (DE100), DD310 Counselling and Forensic Psychology and the postgraduates modules Forensic psychology: witnesses, experts and evidence on trial (D873) and Research methods dissertation in Social Science (D845) and was the Qualification director for BSc (Honours) Psychology (Q07). Currently I am Co-Chairing our D110 module Exploring psychological worlds: thinking, feeling, doing. 

PhD supervision

I'm happy to supervise any PhDs on face recognition, eyewitness identification, or eyewitness memory.