Dr Abigail Webb

Abigail is a clinical research fellow at the Institute of Health and Wellbeing at the University of Suffolk. Abigail completed her PhD at the University of Essex, where her research explored human facial emotion perception using psychophysical and behavioural approaches. Between 2019 and 2021, Abigail was recipient of the Economic and Social Research Council’s (South East Network for Social Sciences) Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, at the University of Essex. During this time, Abigail’s research focused on visual processing biases for facial displays of fear and exploring the efficacy of virtual reality as a platform for existing and potential audiences of theatre.

Abigail has two areas of research interest. The first explores human facial emotion processing, with a particular focus on the social, evolutionary and/or low-level mechanisms that could influence biases for negative facial displays; how image properties naturally differ between faces; how they can be influenced by image processing techniques, and how perceptual biases are differently observed across experimental paradigms (backward-masking, binocular rivalry, saccadic eye movements, perceptual matching, image analysis). As part of her role at the Institute of Health and Wellbeing, Abigail is exploring facial processing in clinical populations. Abigail’s second area of research focuses on virtual reality theatre within the context of knowledge exchange and impact. In 2020, Abigail was a recipient of the UKRI’s Impact Acceleration Award (2020) on a project that explored the use of virtual reality theatre as a remote social platform for pre-existing and underserved audiences in the arts. Her research in this area addresses themes of technology acceptance, the digital divide, factors that influence social and community belonging, and accessible digitisation.