Alex has a first degree in Psychology and Biology (University of Keele) and a PhD in Psychology (Royal Holloway College, University of London). After a 3-year post-doctoral position at the Universities of Edinburgh and Newcastle, she joined Edinburgh Napier in 1999 as a Research Fellow to work on the EPSRC-funded project “PEDFLOW” led by Prof. Jon Kerridge. In 2002, she took up her current post as Lecturer in Psychology in the School of Health & Social Sciences.

Research Interests

• Pedestrian behaviour & planning
• Perceptions of the urban environment
• Visual search in real-world, urban environments
• Road-crossing behaviour through the lifespan

I am interested in how people perceive, attend to and interact with their visual world – in particular, as pedestrians in the urban environment. My recent work has focussed on how pedestrians deal with various challenges as they negotiate urban space, and how their movement behaviour and subjective experiences of such space may be influenced by factors such as age and attentional load. This work, carried out in conjunction with researchers in psychology, the built environment and computer sciences, has helped inform the development of a computer simulation model of pedestrian behaviour in urban spaces (PEDFLOW), which aims to provide urban and transport planners with a tool to design spaces more conducive to, and pleasant for, walking. I am currently involved in a number of research projects designed to explore what kind of information pedestrians use to inform their decision-making using a combination of methodological approaches (including interviews, performance measurement and gaze tracking).

Current Teaching

• Module leader for PSY08103 “Biological Foundations of Behaviour”
• Module leader for PSY10101 “Cognitive Neuroscience”

PhD Students

Chris Egan (2006 – 2009) “The development of pedestrian behaviour at road crossings”.