Dr Ailsa Millen

I am a Chartered Cognitive Psychologist and Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Stirling. My key research interests centre around face recognition and deception. I had an extensive and varied research career before acquiring a lectureship, which you can read about below.

My research career began in the late 1990s when I joined a project led by St Andrews University that investigated the impact of systematic synthetic phonics on early reading skills across Clackmannanshire. The study played a crucial role in influencing UK educational policy, particularly the decision to prioritise synthetic phonics as a core method for teaching reading in primary schools. It laid the foundation for subsequent initiatives such as the Rose Review.

I joined the University of Stirling as a Psychology student in 1999 and graduated with a BSc (Hons) in Psychology (1st Class) in 2003, specialising in physiological psychology (pain behaviour) and visual neuroscience.

In 2006, I joined the Centre for Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience as a Research Assistant on an interdisciplinary ERC grant focusing on visual neuroscience (spatial navigation, reward learning).

In 2009, I was awarded a Faculty Scholarship by the International Research Centre of Forensic Psychology (IRCFP) at the University of Portsmouth to investigate "The Effect of Deception on Fixation-Based Measures of Memory."

Following my PhD, I joined the University of Stirling as a Research and Teaching Fellow (until 2018) and then as a Principal Investigator on an ESRC grant titled "Identifying Novel Markers of Concealed Face Recognition." This project sought to identify novel approaches to detecting concealed face recognition when a person denies recognising someone they know. In this work I used a multi-methods approach to identify objective evidence of face recognition to better understand how our brains recognise faces. I also tested the robustness of these signals for recognition detection when familiarity varied (newly familiar and perosnal familiar faces) and when individuals attempted to use strategies to conceal their recognition (countermeasures).

I am a chartered cognitive psychologist that specialises in face recognition and deception. I investigate attentional orienting effects and their potential for detecting memory in the absence of accurate recognition (i.e., concealed recognition, prosopagnosia, amnesia). I have a special interest in face recognition, and I pioneer novel approaches for the detection of concealed recognition (e.g., lying about recognising someone or something you know). I’m also exploring the potential for novel neurocomputing technologies to model interactions between brain signals relating to memory and deception.

My research interests span: visual attention, visual perception, recognition memory (faces, objects, scenes), associative memory, episodic memory, deception, memory confidence, metacognition, metacognitive strategies, cognitive neuroscience, neurocomputing, human learning and developmental psychology.

I Co-Lead the Cognition in Complex Environments Research Group in Stirling (CORGiS). I am also a member of the Stirling Vision and Image Processing Group (SVIP). I am a chartered member of the British Psychological Society (BPS) where I am registered with the cognitive psychology, defense and security psychology and psycholobiology sections.

Cognitive Psychology Statistics for Individual Differences in Psychology Individual Differences Online Teaching Student-led electives (module creator and facilitator) Undergraduate project supervision (Single and Joint Honours) Masters project supervision Masters research placement supervision MSc Research Methods