Nick Barraclough

I am interested in the brain mechanisms underlying perception. My research focuses on the perception of people and how we make sense of their behaviour and actions. In our lab we use a range of different techniques including psychophysics, behavioral testing, 3D presentation, Virtual Reality, TMS and electrophysiological recording.

I am happy to supervise projects investigating person perception, recent projects have investigated how visual adaptation can be used to understand our perception of human actions, how we derive different personal traits from action and body shape information and how Autistic individuals infer the mental state of other individuals from their actions. This year I would be particularly interested in supervising the following MSci projects:

How do we integrate body shape information with action information when we make judgments about other peoples’ traits?

How do Autistic traits influence the way perceive human bodies and actions?

How do cognitive representations of other peoples’ behaviour influence social decision-making ability?

I am also open to developing ideas with individual students, or groups of students, in the general area of action and person perception.

Behavioural measures, Psychophysics

Dev

nick.barraclough@york.ac.uk 

Paul Bishop

Student  Wellbeing

I am interested in supervising project in the following areas

-student wellbeing

-learning in higher education

In general I am open to any questionnaire based work

Questionnaire and experimental methods

Clinical

paul.bishop@york.ac.uk 

Angela De Bruin

Bilingualism, language, cognitive ageing

I am happy to supervise projects related to the following topics and/or to discuss project ideas students might have.

- Interaction between bilinguals. A potential project could look at how bilinguals adjust their language choice while talking with another bilingual. For example, if your conversation partner prefers to use Language B, do you start using that language more too? A potential project could also study how this language alignment relates to individual differences in e.g., autistic traits.

- Language, ageing, and social interactions. A potential project could look at how older and younger adults differ in their language comprehension or production (in monolinguals), as well as a potential relationship with daily-life social interactions.

- Perception and processing of speech in familiar and unfamiliar accents. Potential projects could study how people process speech in accents they are more or less familiar with (for example, regional or non-native accents). Projects could also study how people perceive and evaluate such speech (for example, how trustworthy they think the speaker is).

These could work as individual or group projects and can be run online. 

Behavioural measures

Clinical

Dev

angela.debruin@york.ac.uk

Karla Evans

I am particularly interested in visual attention, visual awareness, visual episodic memory, and crossmodal perception. I'm also interested in perceptual expertise and translation work on medical image perception ( e.g. radiology).

I'm happy to supervise projects in all the areas listed, although this year I would be particularly keen to conduct a group project that will look at improving cancer detection by radiologists and radiographers. This project would use eye-tracking and behavioral measures. We work with different NHS Trusts where we conduct these experiments.

There are ongoing studies in the lab using fMRI and eye-tracking looking into ''gist" processing, which prospective students may wish to get involved with. I'm also open to developing ideas with individual students or groups.

fMRI, eye-tracking, Behavioural measures

Neuro

Clinical

Please contact me via email if you are interested at: karla.evans@york.ac.uk 

Gareth Gaskell

Adult psycholinguistics, speech perception, word recognition, word learning, the mental lexicon, sleep and memory consolidation.

I'm happy to supervise projects in all the areas listed, although for this year, here is a specific project:

1)      Previous studies have shown that the more deeply we engage with a stimulus, such as reading a story, the stronger the memory of that event is.  A separate literature shows that memories of recent linguistic events influence how similar linguistic information is processed in the future. This study aims to combine findings from these separate literatures, to see whether linguistic-related memories are more potent in influencing language, if a deeper level of thought was used to encode them.

Polysomnography, behavioural measures

Neuro

gareth.gaskell@york.ac.uk 

Elena Geangu

The effect of screen time on attention development during infancy.

Screen time has been shown to have both positive and negative effects on early neurocognitive development. In this study we will use objective measures of the length and type of exposure to screens infants experience in their home environment, in order to investigate the impact on the development of sustained attention. Behavioural, psychophysical and neural correlates (EEG based) of infant attention can be considered. York Developmental Social Neuroscience Lab has a pre-recorded data set collected from infants 6-, 9-, and 11-months-old which will be used for this project.

Analysis of existing data

Neuro

elena.geangu@york.ac.uk

Silvia Gennari

Interaction of language, learning and memory

Language processing across ages

Language, learning and memory

 Much of what we learn about the visual world is accompanied by language, and we use language to communicate our thoughts and memories. I am interested in the interactions between language use, learning and memory. 

Some example questions are:

1. What kind of verbal labels facilitate the learning of new information?

2. Does talking about the visual world (actions, objects, scenes) improve or distort visual memory?

3.  Does verbally recalling previously seen events change the memory of what happened?

I am also interested in what language use suggest about cognitive development, particularly, in language production. For example,

1. how do adolescents and adults differ in picture descriptions?

2. How healthy aging speaking differs from that of dementia patients?

Behavioural, Development

Dev

silvia.gennari@york.ac.uk

Hannah Hobson

1. Mock juror perceptions of defendants with language needs (DLD)

2. Cloaking and masking amongst neurodivergent and ethnic minority students

hannah.hobson@york.ac.uk

Bailey House

I am particularly interested in how social information, and our beliefs about others, influence (i) what we believe and (ii) how we act.

I am interested in supervising group projects (of 3-4 students) related to two different topics:

(1) Susceptibility to information and misinformation online. This is part of an ongoing research programme exploring how social information affects how we interact with information online. This project will explore how sharing social identity with someone that we encounter online influences whether we believe information that they distribute (e.g. their posts), and how we engage with that information (i.e. sharing it, commenting on it, etc.). Current findings show that people are more likely to believe and engage with posts from people that we feel more similar to, but there is much that we still do not know about how this process works. Students can propose specific research questions such as:

• Does our tendency to believe misinformation depend on the content of that misinformation (e.g. political, medical, scientific)?

• Does the kind of media that misinformation is presented through (e.g. text, images, video, AI-generated) influence our willingness to engage with it (e.g. share it, comment on it, like it)?

• How well do warning messages or other interventions “innoculate” us against believing or engaging with misinformation?

(2) People’s beliefs about the “right” way to share. This project is part of an ongoing project aimed at studying cultural variation in people’s beliefs about the “normative” way to share with others. On average, adults in urban, industrialised societies tend to strongly believe in “egalitarian” sharing: distributing things equally between people. However, what drives this belief in egalitarianism? Is it that we believe that “sharing is right” or is it that we believe that “not sharing is wrong”? It turns out there’s a lot more individual variability in these kinds of beliefs, particularly our opinions about whether it is “wrong” not to share. This project is aimed at trying to understand why people vary in their beliefs about sharing and “not sharing”, and whether there is cultural or group variation in these beliefs here in the UK.

Behavioural measures, online survey-based experiments

bailey.house@york.ac.uk 

Rebecca Jackson

Neurodiversity and creativity

This year I am particularly interested in supervising projects assessing the relationship between creativity, neurodiversity and conceptual knowledge using online experimental methods combined with questionnaires. For instance, are neurodiverse students more creative? Does this creativity relate to their ability to flexibly access concepts? I am also happy to discuss projects in the more general areas of creativity, conceptual knowledge, language and executive function.

Most likely online experiments & questionnaires, potentially in person experiments

rebecca.jackson@york.ac.uk

Rob Jenkins

Human Risk

I am interested in Cognitive Hazards—psychological factors that exacerbate extinction risks. I am especially interested in risks from nuclear weapons, engineered pandemics, and unaligned AI. Psychological attributes that impact these risks include cognitive biases, mind perception, and individual differences.

Recent projects:

• Prevalence of omnicidal tendencies

• Attribution of mind to non-humans

• Weekly cycle in risk tolerance

Behavioural experiments; online surveys; secondary data analysis

rob.jenkins@york.ac.uk 

Sven Mattys

Speech perception, language, hearing.

My current projects concern the perceptual mechanisms underlying speech perception under divided attention and noisy background.

I am also interested in language learning simulations and music perception.

Behavioural, psychophysical.

sven.mattys@york.ac.uk 

Cade McCall

Threat and cognition. Human-robot interaction.

I am currently running projects examining decision-making in threatening environments. I am also willing to supervise projects on human interactions with autonomous systems.

Virtual Reality, behavioural measures, psychophysiology

cade.mccall@york.ac.uk 

Fiona McNab

Working Memory and ignoring distraction.

I offer behavioural studies designed to further our understanding of what limits our working memory capacity, and how our ability to ignore distraction plays a role in this.

Our ability to ignore different types of distraction seems to separately limit working memory capacity, and there seem to be separate mechanisms involved in resisting different types of distraction. We now need to understand how these mechanisms work, the different types of challenges they need to overcome, how they deal with different types of stimuli, as well as how they change across the lifespan and how they differ between individuals. I am also interested in distractor resistance in neurodiversity and how playing different types of video games might affect working memory and attention.

Behavioural measures

 fiona.mcnab@york.ac.uk

Liz Meins

Attachment, mind-mindedness and mental health

I have a rich longitudinal dataset spanning the first 20 years of life that includes numerous measures of social-cognitive and social-emotional development and maternal and child mental health. The dataset can be used to investigate many different questions, but some topics that I'm interested to pursue for MSci projects are:

• Does maternal depression and anxiety relate to the quality of mother–child interaction? 

• What factors predict mental health, attachment and social functioning in early adulthood?

Behavioural data coding, questionnaires, secondary data analysis

Dev

Clinical

elizabeth.meins@york.ac.uk 

Tony Morland

Visual perception

Colour vision aftereffects: How long does it take for colour perception to return to baseline following prolonged exposures to coloured environments?  In this project we are interested in understanding how human vision adapts to its environment by using colour as the independent environmental variable.  We will have participants spend time viewing a black and white movie through coloured goggles.  After that time we will record how their perception of colour (the colour yellow) changes over time (an hour or so).  It has long been thought that after relatively short adaptation periods, of an hour, recovery to baseline of colour perception is rapid and depends on the dynamics of cone photoreceptors.  We have recently shown, however, that the recovery takes longer than cones take to recover and need to understand further what mechanisms are at play.

We use an optical instrument that allows participants to adjust the colour of a small patch (by varying its wavelength).  We ask participants to make the patch appear neither red nor green (that is, yellow).  This wavelength setting is known as Unique Yellow and is set very precisely by individuals, but shifts following exposure to coloured environments.  We will use modeling to determine the nature of the recovery to baseline of colour perception and relate it to candidate mechanisms in the visual pathway.

Neuro

antony.morland@york.ac.uk

Kyla Pennington

I am broadly interested in stress sensitivity and reactivity in relation to mental health.

This year I am happy to supervise projects in the following areas:

1. Impact of risk or resilience factors on stress perception and/or stress physiology including in relation to schizotypy or ADHD.

2. Short intervention studies to reduce stress perception and/or physiological signs of stress.

Psychophysiological methods e.g. heart rate variability either in lab using ECG or from wearables.  Questionnaires, cognitive tasks and/or experimental measures.  

Dev

Clinical

kyla.pennington@york.ac.uk

Gavin Phillips

My main interests lie in the general area of mental health. Related topics such as addiction, emotion and motivation crop up regularly too.

I am more than happy to offer a project that broadly relates to mental health, likely working as a group. I will have a specific project in mind, so if you're interested then drop me a line and I'll send you a summary. Titles of recent projects I've supervised include: 

• The Body Positive Movement: Effects of Body-Positive Instagram-style Imagery and Imagery captions on Measures of Well-being

• Great Expectations: Anticipation of Gratitude and Well-being

• The effects of Positive Media Exposure on Improving Public Perceptions of Mental Health

• Effects of Aspirant Body-Related Imagery on Well-being

• Good times: Reminiscing, Gratitude, and Well-being

• Factors Mediating Well-being and Loneliness in University Students: An Exploration Into the Role of Autism and Demographic Variables

• Is There a Relationship Between Types of Technology Usage and Social Media on Individual’s Measure of their own Mental Well-being

• The Influence and Effect of the Body Positivity Movement: Mental Health, Well-Being, and Body Image

• The Effectiveness of Instagram-Style Self-Compassion Visual Materials on Implicit and Explicit Well-being

• Breaking the cycle: Counting your Blessings

• The Effects of Information Style on Attitudes Towards Mental Illness

• The Immediate and Longitudinal Effects of Gratitude Diaries for Positive Events and People on Well-being

• Weight Consciousness as a Function of Personality

• Think Positive: Is Attributional Style a Predictor of Psychological Well-Being

Behavioural

Clinical

gavin.phillips@york.ac.uk 

Catherine Preston

Interoception and the menstrual cycle

I would like to offer a neuroimaging project EEG to examine interoception during the menstrual cycle, specifically looking at heartbeat evoked potentials.

I am also happy to offer other projects on the following topics:

- examining perinatal body experience using psychometric or qualitative approaches.

- Using a body image intervention for improvements in body satisfaction

- Using multisensory body illusions (e.g. the rubber hand illusion) to examine fundamental principles of body ownership.

EEG

catherine.preston@york.ac.uk

Philip Quinlan

I have a general interest in attention and attentional control and more recently I have been concerned with aspects of visual short-term memory

I am happy to consider supervising projects on these general topics.  I also have an experiment on ensemble encoding in vision that might be of interest.

Strictly behavioural measures - RT, accuracy.

philip.quinlan@york.ac

Alex Reid

I am interested in various forms of memory consolidation that result from sleep. This includes lexical integration, memory transformation, false memory creation and emotional memory consolidation.

More recently I have become interested in developing educational interventions that reduce the impact and influence of ‘fake news’.

I am happy to supervise behavioural experiments that disentangle the influences of sleep and time on memory consolidation. This could broadly relate to a number of areas within this remit, such as emotional or lexical memory consolidation, or a related project of your own devising (the literature is vast and varied!). Unlike other sleep researchers in this list our experiments would likely take place over one or two days outside the sleep lab (i.e. will be home-based rather than lab-based), and would not involve EEG. 

I am also interested in developing educational interventions to help people distinguish from ‘real’ and ‘fake’ news. This is a new and prescient interest I would like to explore further with a student.

Behavioral measures, questionnaires

alex.reid@york.ac.uk (I am happy to arrange a cursory meeting for questions)

Katie Slocombe

Animal communication and cognition (Dogs)

Human infant development

I will be offering (i) a dog project and (ii) a developmental project this year

Dog project. Depending on interest and group size, it will be possible to offer one of the following projects:

 Dog Dictionary: This project would aim to collect high quality audio recordings of dog
vocalisations in a range of contexts, so we can look for acoustic variation in vocalisations
given in different contexts, which may contribute towards efforts to build a 'dog dictionary'
for their vocalisations. For this project you need to know plenty of people (friends / family)
with dogs who you would need to feel confident to visit those dogs in their homes and
make the recordings. Most people have a larger dog network at home than in York, and if
this is the case then dog data collection needs to occur over the summer. In order for this
to possible you need to be willing to create time at the end of Semester 2 to (i) apply for
ethical approval for the data collection from Biology (1 hour) and (ii) attend a training
session with me on data collection methods (4 hours). 
Since this project involves working with dogs it is essential that you are confident with
dogs and have experience interacting safely with them.

Cross cultural Developmental project: Cooperation in infancy and early childhood
in the UK and Uganda.
This project would involve coding and analysing data from our existing longitudinal data
set collected in UK and rural Uganda. We ran two experiments to test cooperative skills in
infants at 18m (and 24m for most UK participants, but not Ugandan participants due to
the pandemic), and then two different paradigms when those same children were 4-5
years old. You have the chance to run longitudinal analyses and make cross-cultural
comparisons. You will be trained on the use of video coding software and work with other

Behavioural:
Observational and experimental.
Video coding / Acoustic analysis

group members to device a coding scheme before implementing it.

Behavioural:

Observational and experimental.

Video coding / Acoustic analysis

Dev

Please contact me via email if you are interested in any of these projects: (Katie.slocombe@york.ac.uk)

Alex Wade

MaryAnn Noonan

How does social information and reward influence decision making and learning in adolescents?

Adolescence is a late, sensitive period of development, during which young people gain independence and develop mature social goals (Fuhrmann et al 2015 TICS). This project asks why and when are adolescents more influenced by peers than adults? Adolescents can be particularly influenced by their peers (Knoll, Gaule et al. 2020), but outside the social domain they are less influenced by misleading instructions and more reliant on experiential reward (Decker, Lourenco et al. 2015). Learning from another’s behaviour relies on the same computations as learning from our own experience and depends on neighbouring subregions of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), with these regions and the wider network showing different rates of maturation. We will investigate the neural differences between adolescents and adults as they learn from advice from teenagers that varies in trustworthiness.

MRI

Yes

Alex Wade

Can we decode consciousness from illusory motion?

Vision is a combination of input (what comes into the eye) and expectation (we see what we expect to see). One way to pull these two types of computation apart is to present viewers with 'bistable illusory stimuli' - for example constant flashing dots that seem to move with a direction that changes spontaneously. Because the bottom-up input is constant but perception changes, we can then ask which neural signals correspond to consciousness as opposed to visual drive. This study will use the new OPM-MEG system combined with advanced source imaging and multivariate decoding techniques to study this phenomenon and ask where in the brain conscious perception is located.

MRI, MEG

Yes

Karla Evans

Characterising the Dynamics of Scene Memorability Across Time and Space

What helps people remember images? Across different people, some images are better remembered than others, a quantifiable property of an image referred to as its memorability. This project will characterise the spatiotemporal dynamics of scene memorability by collecting both fMRI and MEG data for the same participants and stimuli.

MRI, MEG

Yes

Tony Morland

The impact of visual loss of the structure of the human brain

Loss of visual input to the brain has consequences on its anatomy, most notably in visual areas. The focus of this project will be to investigate other areas of the brain that may increase in volume as a result of compensatory mechanisms involved in adaptation to visual loss.

HCP data (no data collection)

Existing Data

Silvia Gennari

Language Influences on Memory

Previous studies have shown that memory recollection can be modulated by the language used during visual perception. For example, naming colours or scenes can lead to poorer visual memory, such as misidentifying a previously observed colour or scene. In this study, we will compare the recall of scenes or videos previously studied with or without verbal concepts. The goal is to explore whether a different network of regions is engaged when recalling via verbal concepts or visual memory, and whether frontal regions are more engaged when language is involved.

MRI

Yes

Rebecca Jackson

Flexible access to meaning across time & the impact of neurodiversity

In this project, we will collect data using the new OPM-MEG system. We will identify the time course of regions involved in the flexible retrieval of meanings (e.g., accessing the word “bat” following “vampire” versus “baseball”). As this flexibility may be linked to creativity and neurodiversity, we will also assess whether individual differences in these time courses relate to ADHD symptoms.

MEG

Yes

Beth Jefferies

Mind-wandering during reading and maths

This project will use OPM-MEG and MRI to understand the brain states that link to task focus or mind-wandering in reading and maths. Participants will complete experience multi-dimensional experince sampling questions about the characteristics of their on-task and off-task thoughts, which can then be linked to variation in their brain states. We will combine this data with a previously collected sample, making it possible to assess how brain states and focus vary with ADHD characteristics.

MRI, MEG

Yes