I received my BSc and Phd from the University of Nottingham. My PhD investigated low level motion perception. During my BSc I spent a year working for the DRA on Human Factors of simulators and jet fighters.

After my PhD worked in Montreal, at McGill University, again looking at low level vision but this time investigating texture perception and amblyopia (lazy eye). I became interested in how higher level processes such as attention influence low level vision.

I returned to the UK to spend several years at the University of Birmingham, including 5 as an RCUK fellow. I used behavioural measures and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to investigate the interaction of vision and attention through the adult life span.

I started at Nottingham in September 2011 and am investigating the interaction of attention with perception in multiple contexts including driving, low level and mid level vision and ignoring.

I'm particularly interested in how our brains represent things that we ignore. Do we process and then block these signals, or turn them down at source? Does it matter if we simply attend to something else or if we specifically choose to ignore an object. Do these processes get harder with age?

 

My research aims to understand and prevent mental health problems such as depression, self-injury and suicidality in those diagnosed with autism. My ESRC funded research is developing new assessment tools for autistic adults, to help clinicians and researchers more effectively identify and explore depression and suicidality in autism. My NIHR and Autistica funded research is exploring why autistic people may be more likely to die by suicide than other clinical groups, in order to develop new ways to prevent suicide in autism. My research is designed in partnership with the autistic community, to ensure that our work is relevant and helpful.

These include manipulating and selecting relevant information in working memory, ignoring distractions, suppressing inappropriate response tendencies, and flexibly shifting between different tasks. I am interested in how these processes develop in typical school-age children, how they contribute to academic achievement, and why they go awry in neurodevelopmental conditions such as ADHD and preterm birth. I also investigate the neural mechanisms that support the development of cognitive control processes using neuroimaging techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG).

Much of children's and adults' knowledge about the world is acquired indirectly from other people, rather than from direct experience. Our ability to benefit from the knowledge of others confers obvious advantages, but carries the risk that we will believe false claims (e.g., mistakes, lies). In order to balance effectively the benefits and risks of receiving information from other people, we need to be able to evaluate the likely truth of that information. The overarching aim of my current research is to examine how children master this task so that they remain open to reliable new information while filtering out unreliable testimony, thus optimising the social learning process. I am keen to hear from prospective PhD candidates who are interested in conducting a PhD in this area.

Typically, I seek converging evidence from traditional methods in experimental psychology (such as eye-tracking, self-paced reading, and language production tasks); and cognitive neuroscience methods (for example, EEG).

My interests lie in how our knowledge of the world and of the context in which we encounter language enable us to understand what we are reading or listening to. Issues that I am currently investigating include; the comprehension of non-literal language (metaphor and irony), the processing of emotional information, reference resolution, quantification, and how readers resolve syntactic and semantic ambiguities more generally.

I also have a strong interest in how basic research in experimental psychology can inform more applied issues, such as the communication of information relating to healthcare (and how this impacts on patient safety), and language development.

Some kinds of hand movements can be performed extremely quickly, almost without thought, and often when the target of our movement suddenly and unexpectedly changes - these are the kinds of movements I study. A second strand of my research examines how the brain processes information coming from the hands, in particular simple vibrations on the fingertips. By stimulating the brain and peripheral nerves with an electromagnet, we can work out exactly where and when the brain is processing the vibrations.

Past Research

My PhD examined how the brain processes lights and touches felt on or near the hands. The brain seems to treat objects close to the body (say, within 30cm of your skin) quite differently to objects that are further away. This idea of 'personal space' leads to many predictions about how the brain might process visual and tactile stimuli on and near the skin. My PhD used behavioural and neuroimaging methods to test these predictions.

 For instance, I would like to understand how we read nonverbal behaviour such as actions or gestures to give us insight into others' thoughts, feelings and intentions. I am also interested in finding out how individuals with autism interpret these signals differently, and why they might struggle during social encounters.

 

I am currently involved with several research studies. These include:

1) The effectiveness of mobile technology in supporting the development of scholastic skills in primary school children in developing countries, including Malawi, and in high-income countries such as the UK. Access the following links for more on this project: 

https://www.facebook.com/onebillionchildren/videos/1011242478954734/

https://onebillion.org/evidence

http://www.vsointernational.org/fighting-poverty/where-we-work/malawi/unlocking-talent

https://unlockingtalent.org/about

2) Cognitive and motor development in vulnerable children (following preterm birth, brain tumour, and in children from areas of high social deprivation)

3) The effects of cerebellar tumour sustained in childhood on neurodevelopmental outcome and wellbeing

4) Orthographic processing in developing, skilled, and dyslexic readers

Autism spectrum disorders

At the moment I am particularly interested in how people with ASD make inferences about other people's mental states and personality traits. Conversely, how do typical adults form impressions of those with ASD? What type of perceptual information do people rely on to make these judgments? I am also interested in the more general question of what kind of beliefs people in the population hold about ASD, and whether they differ across cultures?

Psychology of driving

I'm particularly interested in how these processes differ between individuals who have learned to drive in environments where driver behaviour, accident and fatality rates dramatically differ: for instance, we have carried out a number of studies comparing drivers from the UK with drivers from Malaysia. I'm also interested in how other individual differences may influence performance within the driving domain, including how having an Autism Spectrum Disorder affects aspects of driving skill.