Rate My Professor Will Harrison

Dr. Will Harrison is a Lecturer in Psychology in the School of Health at the University of the Sunshine Coast. He earned his PhD in Psychology from the University of Queensland in 2013. After completing his doctorate, he undertook postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Medical School, the University of Queensland, and the Queensland Brain Institute. Harrison has received significant recognition for his early career achievements, including the National Health and Medical Research Council CJ Martin Fellowship (2015–2019) and the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (2019–2022), both at the University of Queensland. More recently, he was awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery grant valued at $438,000 to explore how high-dimensional visual experiences arise from neural processing.

As a cognitive neuroscientist, Will Harrison investigates how the brain transforms visual information into conscious perceptions, thoughts, and memories. His research focuses on object perception and memory in peripheral vision, the effects of eye movements on vision, and how natural scene statistics guide perceptual processes. He applies psychophysics, neuroimaging, and computational modeling to advance understanding of visual cognition, with implications for designing intuitive visual displays and enhancing human-computer interfaces. Harrison has published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in leading journals, including the Journal of Neuroscience, Current Biology, Nature Communications, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Key publications include "Eye movement targets are released from visual crowding" (Journal of Neuroscience, 2013), "A unifying model of orientation crowding in peripheral vision" (Current Biology, 2015), "Visual working memory is independent of the cortical spacing between memoranda" (Journal of Neuroscience, 2018), "Neural tuning instantiates prior expectations in the human visual system" (Nature Communications, 2023), and recent works such as "A computational account of transsaccadic attentional allocation based on visual gain fields" (PNAS, 2024). He teaches PSY104 Research Methods and Analysis 1 at the University of the Sunshine Coast.