Abstract :
The 35th Annual Conference of the society was hosted by the School of Psychology, The University of
Western Australia and held at the Tradewinds Hotel in Fremantle. Western Australia was a fitting location
given Ross Day’s central role in establishing and maintaining the society and that the year also marked the
60th anniversary of his first teaching appointment, which was at the University of Western Australia. The
conference also highlighted the vigour in Australasian Experimental Psychology with attendees, old, new,
and in-training, energetically engaged in internationally competitive research. There were 166 presentations
(122 talks and 44 posters) presented in four streams over the three days. The presenters included 100
academics and 66 students and while the majority were from Australia, speakers from New Zealand, the
United Kingdom, France, Canada, USA, Hong Kong and Taiwan also presented. The society was able to
maintain the focus on student research by providing 38 travel awards to assist them to attend, resulting in
193 registrants overall.
The quality of the work presented was exciting and bodes well for the future of both the society and the
discipline in the region. One particularly noteworthy aspect was the substantial breadth of coverage of the
discipline within the conference.
Student prizes were awarded for five outstanding presentations. The recipients were (in alphabetical
order): Ms Renita Almeida (University of Western Australia), Mr Hugh Dennett (Australian National
University), Ms Hanne Lie (University of Western Australia), Ms Petroula Mousikou (Macquarie
University) and Mr Thomas Wallis (University of Queensland).
The organising committee wishes to thank the School of Psychology for its financial support of the
conference and also Doug Robb and Ann Deveson-Kelly for their assistance in creating the registration
forms and tracking of the finances respectively. We would also like to thank those many students who so
willingly gave their time to support the preparation and running of the conference, particularly Drs Jason
Bell and Edwin Dickinson for their audiovisual support. Finally we thank the presenters for their
participation, not only in the formal sessions, but also in all of those intervening periods where relaxed
conversations between established researchers and students does so much to facilitate the development of
the discipline.
