Dr Sarah Laurence
Senior Lecturer In Psychology
Biography
Professional biography
I joined the Open University in November 2020. Previously, I worked as a Lecturer in the School of Psychology at Keele University and I spent two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brock University, Canada, working in the Face Perception Lab. I started my academic career at the University of Sussex where I completed both my BSc. and Ph.D. in Psychology.
Research interests
I am currently conducting research that aims to understand: a) the nature of our memory representations of familiar faces, b) how a face transitions from being unfamiliar to familiar, c) face recognition in applied settings (e.g. policing, security, missing persons).
In 2018 I was awarded a New Investigator award from the Economic and Social Research Council. This is funding a project that examines how we recognise faces across changes in appearance brought about by ageing.
Publications
Journal Article
Multiple images captured from a single encounter do not promote face learning (2024)
The effect of facial ageing on forensic facial image comparison (2024)
Recognising Newly Learned Faces Across Changes in Age (2024)
Towards Efficient AI Solutions for Facial Recognition in the Wild (2024)
Children's ability to recognize their parent's face improves with age. (2022)
The sibling familiarity effect: Is within-person facial variability shared across siblings? (2022)
Recognising familiar faces out of context (2021)
Attending to Identity Cues Reduces the Own-age but not the Own-race Recognition Advantage (2019)
Research activity in Canadian developmental psychology programs (2016)
The flip side of the other-race coin: They all look different to me (2015)
