Amanda Barnier

Biography

I began my career in Psychology at Macquarie University, graduating in 1991 with a BA (Hons) and then went on to complete a PhD in Psychology (1996) at the University of New South Wales. Following postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, I returned to Australia and UNSW as an Australian Research Council (ARC) Postdoctoral Fellow and later as an ARC Queen Elizabeth II Fellow. In 2007 I moved to the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science (MACCS) as an ARC Australian Research Fellow. In 2013 I became an ARC Future Fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University. And I am a Chief Investigator of Macquarie’s ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders. My research involves investigations of autobiographical remembering and forgetting, drawing on concepts and approaches from hypnosis and posthypnotic amnesia and from experimental and clinical work on memory. I work with an interdisciplinary team of cognitive psychologists, philosophers and neuropsychologists at Macquarie and beyond. My current research explores relationships among individual memory, individual memory in small groups, and small group “collective memory”. I am interested in the costs and benefits of remembering alone vs. together and focusing on when and how remembering with a long-term partner helps memory, especially as we age. I also maintain a strong interest and experimental research program in hypnosis: how it works and how it can be used to understand everyday and clinical distortions of perception, memory, action and belief. Finally, I am very interested in communicating the results of my research and of psychology, memory, and hypnosis in general to the broader community. I have participated in educational programs for primary and secondary school students, and I have contributed to science communication programs on television, radio, in print, online and via guest lectures.

Research Interest

• Leadership • Social Cognition • Organizational Justice