Postgraduate Prospectus

MPhil and PhD

These research degrees are available in each of the School’s four main research areas:

The cognition subgroup explores core and applied areas of cognitive psychology such as attention, eye movements, memory, and language. Our research explores how human performance changes with experience, using eye-tracking methodologies to record differences. Examples include the difference between experienced and less experienced readers, first and second language users, and differences between novice and experienced car drivers. Our work on memory investigates the influence of emotional and threatening material upon recall and recognition. We are also using eye-tracking to investigate the cognitive processes that are used to comprehend combinations of text and graphics (eg advertisements, photograph captions in newspapers, and figure captions in textbooks.

Our research in cognitive neuroscience focuses on two main areas, perception and action, and vision. Within perception and action we are particularly interested in understanding the psychological and brain mechanisms through which sensory information is bound together and used to plan and control human action. We are also interested in the recovery of function after brain injury. Our research in vision ranges from traditional visual psychophysics to computational modelling, electrophysiology and brain scanning. The School of Psychology is particularly well resourced to carry out research in cognitive neuroscience, with facilities for electrophysiology, structural and functional brain imaging (MRI and fMRI), dense-sensor EEG recording in both human adults and infants, transcranial magnetic stimulation studies, and numerous systems for tracking eye, hand, and body movements online.

Research into theory of mind, autism, learning and tutoring, extending into interdisciplinary and strategic research relevant to education and abnormal development. The group investigates how visual representations and teaching strategies influence the psychological processes that underlie learning. They are also exploring the boundaries of heightened visuo-spatial abilities in autism, and relating these to aspects of size and shape constancy, which have been found to be disrupted in autism.

Research includes a range of basic and applied topics including emotion, violence, blood donation, public perceptions of new biotechnology, nuclear waste and the environment, and judgmental forecasting. For example, the group has formulated a theory of unfolding patterns of events (marriage breakdown, road traffic accidents, violent acts), and outlined actions that would lead to favourable outcomes.

A major expression of this work is in our understanding of dangerous situations on the road, where 65% of traffic accidents could be prevented by the application of three simple behavioural rules. The group is interested in understanding human decision making processes in relation to judgements about risk and health and safety issues. This involves applying theoretical models in applied settings (NHS hospital staff; private sector industry, patient groups) and conducting fundamental experimental work (eg gambling tasks, implicit attitudes). Of particular theoretical interest to this group is the role played by emotions (eg Damasio`s somatic markers hypothesis, appraisal tendencies hypothesis, attributional accounts, risk-as-feelings hypothesis), contextual variables (eg cueing, priming) and individual differences (normal personality, abnormal personality, and health anxiety).

The Behavioural Neuroscience group investigates the fundamental learning and memory processes that form the fabric of our mental life. Behavioural, psychopharmacological, neuroanatomical and genetic approaches are used to understand the mechanics of learning and its underlying biology. We also examine higher order processes, such as the dependence of learned associations on context. This understanding of learning is also applied to the clinical study of diseases in which associative processes are disordered. For example, in schizophrenia, we find that learning occurs inappropriately about stimuli that would normally be treated as irrelevant, redundant or in some other way indistinct. In applied studies, we find evidence that bio-associative mechanisms may contribute to increased symptom reporting in clinical (eg Gulf war veterans) and non-clinical samples (eg people feeling ill at work).