Rate My Professor Lisa Jefferies

Dr. Lisa Jefferies is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Applied Psychology within Griffith Health at Griffith University, where she has served since 2015, initially as a Lecturer before her promotion. She earned her BA (Hons), MA, and PhD in Psychology. Prior to Griffith, she worked as a Research Assistant at Murdoch University from January 2013 to May 2015. Her research centers on visual attention and related cognitive processes, including working memory, visuospatial attention, cognitive neuroscience, memory, cognitive psychology, psychophysiology, psychophysics, visual perception, and visual processing. Dr. Jefferies leads the VCA Lab, utilizing behavioral and psychophysical techniques to explore how focused attention facilitates efficient interaction with the visual environment. The lab's efforts are funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP190101948, titled 'A honking horn can blind you: how sudden distractions redirect attention'), in collaboration with Adjunct Professor Vincent Di Lollo and Professor Grace Iarocci. She actively supervises PhD students such as Emily Ireland and Lisa Lui, who achieved first and second place in the School of Applied Psychology's 3 Minute Thesis competition in 2024, with Emily Ireland advancing to win the Health Group competition and competing at the university level.

In teaching, Dr. Jefferies convenes key undergraduate courses including Introduction to Psychology 1 (1001PSY) and Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology (1003PSY), contributing to the foundational education of psychology students on the Gold Coast campus. Her scholarly impact is evidenced by over 600 citations across platforms like Google Scholar and ResearchGate. Notable publications include 'The spatial extent of focused attention modulates attentional disengagement' (Psychological Research, 2023, with Rebecca Lawrence and Elizabeth Conlon), 'Attentional focusing increases the effective capacity of visual working memory' (Journal of Vision, 2016), and 'Disengaging from the forest versus the trees: The spatial extent of focused attention modulates the rate of attentional disengagement' (2021). Additional works feature contributions to understanding attentional mechanisms in contexts like sudden distractions and visual processing. Dr. Jefferies' contributions advance cognitive psychology, particularly in attentional disengagement and capacity enhancement.