Dr. Branka Spehar

Biography

Branka Spehar is a Professor in the Science School of Psychology at the University of New South Wales. She completed her Doctorate in Experimental Psychology at Rutgers University in New Jersey in 1994, after receiving her M.A. in Experimental Psychology from the same institution in 1992. She also holds an M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Psychology from the University of Zagreb. Her primary research focuses on vision, specifically how context affects perception and how fragmented local information is perceptually integrated into a global percept. Professor Spehar investigates the neural mechanisms underlying these processes, particularly related to visual preference and aesthetic appreciation. Her work encompasses developmental aspects of visual perception, including how infants and children develop sensitivity to visual statistics of natural images. She has served as Review Editor for Frontiers in Perception Science and held editorial positions with other prominent journals in her field. Over her career, she has supervised numerous PhD students and has received various research grants to support her innovative work in understanding the interplay between visual perception and underlying neural processes.

Research Interests