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 research focuses on the psychology of justice. Specifically, I am interested in the various ways the justice motive appears in people’s lives. Within this larger framework, I am currently investigating how a concern for justice and deservingness can influence victim derogation, immanent justice reasoning, self-defeating beliefs and behaviours, temporal discounting, investment decisions, and spending behaviors.
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 both social cognition and intercultural contact. The project I am currently proposing for the Research Experience Scheme is the following: Do expectations matter? That is, if two people experienced the same outcome from an event, but had different expectations prior to it, do their evaluations of the outcome differ? Some research suggests that they do, but support for this varies. This particular project will follow on from previous studies that have tested this hypothesis but found mixed results. This project will involve manipulating participants' expectations about and their experiences in a particular task. This will result in a number of conditions where participants find their expectations either met or not (a match or mismatch). Their subsequent evaluations of the matched or mismatched outcomes will then be measured.
My research is concerned with touch and the body from a variety of perspectives. To investigate how we represent and process bodily information, our own and that of others, I measure behavioural and brain responses when people experience or observe touch, view their own or another’s body, and prepare and observe motor actions. Projects with me will involve using tactile apparatus to deliver vibrations (typically to the fingers) and other devices to measure perceptual judgments or movements, and may involve learning to use brain imaging methods (EEG, ERPs) to explore the neural basis of touch and body processing.
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 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.
Bundy Mackintosh and Elaine Fox
Our 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 we are interested in at the moment are attentional and interpretive threat biases (although others interest us). Recent work includes focusing on examining potential relationships between these biases, and further developing cognitive theoretical accounts of how they function. We are happy to work on a range of projects; We have three or four available should you wish to use them. We use questionnaires and computer studies to investigate cognitive biases with the eventual aims of reducing anxiety and easing depression.
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 main research interests are focused on human motivation, self-regulation, and psychological well-being in virtual environments such as videogames and Facebook. RES projects will use a wide range of data collection techniques to get at the heart of why people play games and what effects digital environments have on well-being. I look forward to working with students who want to dig deeper into the psychological aspects of what is happening when millions of people spend billions of hours in virtual spaces.
I am interested in how we develop those cognitive abilities that make us human and different from other animals. How is it that we are able to understand the way that the world works, and to control our behaviour, to achieve our goals within this world? I research executive functions – the higher cognitive abilities which enable us to engage in flexible, goal-oriented behaviour. How do these abilities unfold during development? I am also interested in how children’s knowledge of tools develops, and so enable them to live in a ‘tool-dense’ culture.
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.
