“Whatever future conclusion we may reach as to this, we cannot deny that an object once attended to will remain in the memory, whilst one inattentively allowed to pass will leave no traces behind.”

William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890)

After graduating with a PhD in cognitive psychology from The University of Queensland in 2012, I taught at The University of Queensland until 2016 before moving to Federation University in 2017. I currently work as a lecturer in psychology at Federation University, with a focus on cognitive and biological psychology, and writing for psychology. I also hold an honorary research fellowship at The University of Queensland.

Research Interests

I have a particular interest in the processes that underlie memory formation and forgetting, especially the role of attention and interference with consolidation. I am also interested in the subjective experience of remembering and imagining the future, and the applications of memory research in legal domains.

History of Psychology

In addition to my primary research interests, gaining a deeper understanding of the history of experimental psychology and the individuals who helped to develop the field into what it has become today is another long-standing fascination of mine. The role of women, in particular, during the earliest days of psychology’s emergence as a science is a little known but fascinating area of the discipline’s history that I strongly believe deserves greater recognition.

As Elizabeth Scarborough and Laurel Furumoto explain in Untold Lives: The First Generation of American Women Psychologists, women have actively contributed to the discipline since its earliest days in the 1890s, yet their presence has largely been “blotted out of historical accounts.” Given that women’s historical contributions to other sciences are now being recognised, it is my hope that one day names such as Christine Ladd-Franklin, Mary Whiton Calkins, and Margaret Floy Washburn will be as well known as the men they worked with.

Publications

  • Miloyan, B., McFarlane, K. A., & Suddendorf, T. (2019). Measuring mental time travel: Is the hippocampus really critical for episodic memory and episodic foresight? Cortex, 117, 371-385. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2019.01.020

  • Miloyan, B., & McFarlane, K. A. (2019). The measurement of episodic foresight: A systematic review of assessment instruments. Cortex, 117, 351-370. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2018.08.018

  • Miloyan, B., McFarlane, K. A., & Vasquez-Echeverria, A. (2019). The adapted Autobiographical Interview: A systematic review and proposal for conduct and reporting. Behavioral Brain Research, 370, 111881. doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2019.03.050

  • Burt, J. S., McFarlane, K. A., Kelly, S. J., Humphreys, M. S., Weatherall, K. G., & Burrell, R. G. (2017). Brand name confusion: Subjective and objective measures of orthographic similarity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 23(3), 320-335. doi:10.1037/xap0000127

  • Humphreys, M. S., McFarlane, K. A., Burt, J. S., Kelly, S. J., Weatherall, K. G., & Burrell, R. G. (2017). Recognition in context: Implications for trade mark law. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24(5), 1665-1672. doi:10.3758/s13423-017-1235-6

  • Humphreys, M. S., McFarlane, K. A., Burt, J. S., Kelly, S. J., Weatherall, K. G., & Burrell, R. G. (2017). How important is the name in predicting false recognition for lookalike brands? Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 23(3), 381-395. doi:10.1037/law0000133

  • McFarlane, K. A., & Humphreys, M. S. (2012). Maintenance-rehearsal: The key to the role attention plays in storage and forgetting. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 38(4), 1001-1018. doi:10.1037/a0026783

  • Humphreys, M. S., Maguire, A. M., McFarlane, K. A., Burt, J. S., Bolland, S. W., Murray, K. L., & Dunn, R. (2010). Using maintenance rehearsal to explore recognition memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 36(1), 147-159. doi:10.1037/a0017687