Participating Staff
My general research interest lies in evolutionary psychology--the study of how human behaviour and cognition may have been shaped by evolution. This approach applies knowledge of natural selection and sexual selection, as well animal behaviour, to the study of human psychology. My focus is on conducting experiments on prosociality/altruism, morality, norms, leadership, and social policing. I am also interested in computer simulations of social behaviour (I haven’t listed any simulation studies here, but if you like programming/computers, I am happy to work with you to develop such a project). I use various techniques in my research, including questionnaires (online and paper), computer tasks (IAT, lexical decision task, etc.), and simulations.
My research investigates how we process language. In particular, I am interested in emotional language processing in normal and special populations (e.g. bilinguals, ageing, patients). My research employs event-related brain potentials (ERPs), but I also use behavioral methodologies and eye tracking to understand how language processing in emotional and bilingual contexts works. Projects with me will involve learning to use EEG or eye-tracking equipment to test participants in the lab. Typically, this involves measuring brain activity and eye movements while participants listen to single words or sentences and/or look at pictures/scenes.
My current research interests are in the cognitive psychology of spoken word production. This can be tested experimentally using the picture-word and Stroop tasks. I am especially interested in the role of competition between activated candidate names in the process of lexical selection. How do we select which word to say? This can be studied in naming by examining the consequences of activating alternative names (e.g., synonyms in monolinguals and translations in bilinguals).
My primary interests are in the cognitive psychology of visuo-spatial attention and visuo-spatial working memory. What are the basic mechanisms underlying the selection of relevant and the rejection of irrelevant stimuli? In particular to what extent does selection based on different stimulus properties e.g. stereoscopic depth, motion, and temporal factors share a common basis. Once selected what is the fate of these stimuli, how are they represented and maintained in working memory? What are the fundamental limits on human storage capacity, and how is working memory linked up to sensory perception? RES projects will use computer based behavioural testing to address these basic issues. Projects may involve presenting moving and or 3-D stereoscopic stimuli. Students will participate in aspects of study design, participant recruitment and testing, and data analysis.
My research investigates how people perceive and pay attention to the things around them. In particular, I am interested in the neural, visual, cognitive and social processes that determine where people look and what people notice and remember when they look there. Projects with me would involve measuring attention and eye movements while people look at pictures and/or watch movies of real world scenes.
I have research interests in social cognition and culture. In the area of social cognition I do research on stereotypes and mental control. My interest in culture is twofold: looking at cultural differences in social cognition and examining the impact of cultural contact. Projects with me would involve either survey or lab-based studies. Through the RES project you will learn about the design of a study, material preparation (such as survey design), data collection, data management, data analyses and presentation.
My research investigates processes that are involved in speech production and memory. I am particularly interested in the retrieval errors that occur when we are attempting to produce familiar names (in particular tip-of-the-tongue experiences that occur during attempts to recall the names of people that we know). In collaboration with Debi Roberson, I am also interested in the role of colour categories in perception and memory of colour. That is, are colours easier to perecive or remember if we categorize them (e.g. as blue or green). My research in these areas currently employs behavioral measures (accuracy and reaction time) but I am keen to use event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to study these phenomena in the near future.
My research interests are in visual perception, and address the question of how we perceive a three-dimensional world from the two-dimensional images formed in our two eyes. I am also interested in understanding how the visual system is adapted to the information in our natural environment. One result of this is that some unnatural images cause visual discomfort, particularly in some neurological conditions such as migraine. I am interested in understanding the cause of visual discomfort, and how
visual processing differs in migraine.
My research investigates the longitudinal development of executive functions. Executive functions are a set of abilities that allow us to control our behaviour, carry out plans, and keep things in working memory in a flexible way. These abilities start to develop already in infancy and have been linked to the frontal cortex of the brain. I am about to start a project which involves following up a group of approx. 100 children on a range of executive function tasks as well as measures of school performance and social development. I originally tested these children on some very basic executive function tasks when they were 4, 6 and 9 months old – they are now nearly 8 years old! It will therefore be truly exciting to see whether there is any relationship between the very rudimentary executive function abilities that I measured in these children in infancy and their current abilities at primary school age. Testing will start in May 2013 and continue until July 2014, with test preparation and pilot testing taking place January-April this year. If you are interested in this project, you can join at any point. Research experience will involve one or several of the following (depending on the stage of the project and your particular interests): literature search and review, test development, preparation of online material, recruitment and communication with parents, teachers and child participants, behavioural testing using experimental and standardised psychological tests (e.g., computerised tests, IQ tests), and data management.
My research investigates the interaction between action and perception. While many experiments in psychology investigate fast responses to stimuli, this is only one way in which control our behaviour. Indeed, most actions are selected voluntarily, such that we decide how to act dependent on internal needs or desires to achieve a goal, not in response to external stimuli. My research investigates how we understand the link between these types of actions and the effects that they have on the environment (our goals), as well as how this influences the selection of actions. Typical projects will involve collecting data from participants using computerised tasks where participants are asked to perform voluntary actions with different effects. Projects may also involve recording electroencephalogram (EEG) activity from the brain during the task.
Do women find intelligent men more attractive at some times of the menstrual cycle? Can an evolutionarily meaningful context make us remember things better? These are two questions that I am interested in studying this term with assistance from a Research Experience Student (or two or three!). My general research interest is in studying human behaviour as a functionally adaptive system; that is, evolutionary psychology--the study of human behaviour and cognition from an evolutionary perspective. I have already found some data to support the ideas above, but would like to do further work. For the study on language and female fertility, research suggests that women’s attraction to certain male traits (e.g., physical symmetry) varies across the fertility/menstrual cycle. It has been hypothesised that language skills may also be a trait that varies in attractiveness. Regarding the study relating to memory and evolution, research has found that people apparently remember words better when in a meaningful evolutionary situation than in more familiar but modern settings. I want to further explore this issue.
My general research interest focuses on emotion, the cognitive biases that cause anxiety and depression and how these can be modified with the aim of ameliorating these symptoms. The cognitive biases that I am interested in at the moment are attentional and interpretive threat biases (although others interest me). Recent work includes focusing on examining potential relationships between these biases, and further developing cognitive theoretical accounts of how they function. I want to work on one project that is nearly finished, but not quite. The project consists of three conditions: cognitive bias modification (CBM), cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) and a placebo control (C). There will be two “training” sessions for each condition with each session lasting about 1.5 hours long. I use questionnaires and computer studies to investigate cognitive biases with the eventual aims of reducing anxiety and easing depression.
My research examines how people make judgements and how they make decisions. One of my key areas of interest is the topic of "risky choice". These are situations where you don't know for certain what will happen if you take a particular course of action - in other words, there is an element of chance to the outcome of your choice. Everyday examples include making financial investments, or the decision to undergo surgery. Such decisions are often studied in the lab, where we can carefully control the
attributes of the choices that we put before people. One important issue that researchers have focussed on in recent work is the distinction between two modes of decisions: those that are "described" (you are told the probabilities of the different outcomes for each option) and those that are "experienced" (you learn how good the chances are by observing what happens each time an option is picked). For instance, a patient might receive a leaflet about the chances of success or failure for a surgical procedure (description), whereas a surgeon can also learn about the chances of success by observing the outcome of many operations (experience). Depending upon the type of choice problem, people seem to be systematically riskier in their choices in one mode of choice than in the other. I am interested to have a RES student work with me to examine decisions from experience, to explore how easily participants can learn to make good choices, and to see what influences the choices that they make.
My broad research interest is in the development of perceptual and cognitive abilities in infancy. In particular, I am interested in the infants’ ability of processing and recognising faces and to understand why they are so special to us. I am currently investigating whether other body parts can be considered as special as faces. I am also interested to study how babies learn to combine the inputs coming from different senses, and to understand our multisensory world. To investigate these intriguing infants’ abilities, my research employs event-related brain potentials (ERPs), but also behavioural methods and eye tracking. I am currently in the exciting process of setting up a Babylab in the department in order to continue these (and other) investigations, so depending on when you will be able to join me, the research experience will involve one or several of the following: infants recruitment (e.g., creation of advertisement material, contact and communication with local family centres), literature review, preparation of the studies, testing, and data management.
My main research interests concern the role of human motivation in determining the quality of emotion and interpersonal experiences. This includes the capacity for adaptive self-regulation, such as the regulation of negative emotions and psychological stress, as well as effort and care extended to new interpersonal interactions (such as creative collaborations and prosocial behaviours) and long-lasting relationships (such as romantic relationships and parent-child interactions). I examine the processes by which motivation acts in these domains as well as the implications for the relationship, the individual, and collaborative task performance. Our projects will involve basic study design, participant testing with basic social psychology experimental methods (e.g., behavioural assessments), and maybe – if we wish – the use of other methods such as eye tracking.
The neurology of visual stress. Some images are uncomfortable to look at, and they affect the brain adversely. We can characterise the images that are aversive in terms of their spatial structure and their constituent colours, and this helps us predict the discomfort using computer models. Text has adverse characteristics because of its spatial periodicity and we are exploring ways of reducing this periodicity and improving reading speed in consequence. We can measure objective correlates of discomfort in the hemodynamic response of the brain using near infrared spectroscopy, and in the accommodative response of the eye, using autorefraction. Visual stress is involved in many neurological conditions that affect vision, including dyslexia, migraine, autism and multiple sclerosis. Sometimes visual stress leads to phobias and together with Geoff Cole I am exploring how this can be prevented.
