Rate My Professor Craig Spellman

Professor Craig Speelman holds the position of Professor of Cognitive Psychology in the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University, Joondalup campus. He obtained his Bachelor of Science with Honours and Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology from The University of Western Australia. His academic career includes a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at UWA (1992-1993), lectureships at the University of New England (1994-1995) and Griffith University (1996-1997), and since joining ECU in 1997, promotions to Senior Lecturer (2002-2005), Associate Professor (2006-2007), and Professor (2008-present). He served as Head of School of Psychology and Social Science from 2002 to 2012 and currently acts as Associate Dean Research.

Speelman's research specializes in cognitive psychology, with emphasis on skill acquisition, transfer of skills, automaticity, memory, repetition priming, vigilance, and applications in cyber defense, music cognition, skin cancer detection, and financial decision-making. Key publications include the book "Beyond the Learning Curve: The Construction of Mind" (Oxford University Press, 2005, co-authored with Kim Kirsner), "The Great Psychology Delusion: Missteps, Pitfalls and How to Make a More Successful Psychological Science" (Taylor and Francis, 2025), and articles such as "Statements About the Pervasiveness of Behavior Require Data About the Pervasiveness of Behavior" (Frontiers in Psychology, 2020), "How Mean is the Mean?" (Frontiers in Psychology, 2013), and "Using dual eye tracking to uncover personal gaze patterns during social interaction" (Scientific Reports, 2018). He has developed the Numbeat app for arithmetic skill acquisition and delivered public lectures including "Practice may not make perfect" in The West Australian - ECU Lecture Series. Awards encompass the 1985 Australian Psychological Society Prize, Fellowship of the Psychonomic Society, and the 2018 Endeavour Executive Fellowship. Speelman has led funded projects like physiological indicators of stress in cybersecurity ($180,000, 2020-2024) and supervises doctoral research on related topics.