MSci Projects - Potential Supervisors 2024-25

Potential supervisors and their research interests relevant to projects.

Here you can find information about who is available to supervise MSci projects. Please find a list of faculty members along with some information about their general research interests and the methods used in their labs below. Contact details for all faculty members can be found here.

In the 'Pathway' column of the table you can find information about which of the pathways is most closely related to the supervisor's own interests. You are not restricted to selecting a supervisor from your pathway, i.e., you may opt to do a project on memory with typically developed adults even if you are enrolled on the Developmental Disorders MSci pathway. However, in order to conduct a Neuroimaging study (i.e., fMRI or MEG) or a Developmental project, you must have completed the appropriate pathway-specific modules in Year 3 (i.e., Basic Principles in Neuroimaging & Research, Design & Analysis in Neuroimaging, or Neurodevelopmental Disorders & Assessment of Developmental Disorders, respectively).

In the final column of the table you can find information about how to best contact the supervisor if you would like more information about projects. Some supervisors may have set aside specific times for project information meetings; others may be happy to be contacted by email. In general, no supervisor will take issue with receiving an email requesting some information or a short meeting.

Name	General Interest	Current Topics	Methods Used	Pathway	How to contact
Nick Barraclough	I am interested in the brain mechanisms underlying perception. My research focuses on the perception of actions and how we make sense of the behavior of other individuals. 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 action perception, recent projects have investigated how visual adaptation can be used to understand action processing mechanisms, how we derive different personal traits from action 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 people in the general population expressing different levels of Autistic traits evaluate the actions of other people. Motion capture of actions and the structure of how actions are represented in the brain. I am also open to developing ideas with individual students, or groups of students, in the general area of action perception.	Psychophysics, Behavioural measures	Dev	nick.barraclough@york.ac.uk
Adam Baron	I am generally interested in concepts relating to positive psychology and the impact these can have on our wellbeing and performance. I have also previously researched and supervised studies related to the concept of emotional labour in terms of how it is both experienced and managed in order to avoid burnout over the longer term.	I am happy to supervise topics related to qualitative or quantitative exploration of positive psychological concepts within higher education study, specifically self-compassion and resilience. I am also open to discussions around any topics more broadly relating to student wellbeing and how this can be supported.	Thematic analysis, questionnaire measures		adam.baron@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
Mike Burton	Face Perception	I am happy to supervise projects in any area of face perception. I am particularly interested in recognition of the people we know. Traditionally, this area has been studied using celebrity faces, but we all know different people, and I am interested in looking at how people’s unique knowledge can be understood. I am also interested in forensically-relevant studies of face recognition, particularly matching faces on ID documents.	Behavioural measures.	Neuro	mike.burton@york.ac.uk
Scott Cairney	Sleep, emotion regulation, mental health, memory.	I'm happy to supervise projects in all of the areas listed. A potential project could look at the relationship between sleep and intrusive thoughts, whereas another could investigate memory replay during sleep.	Virtual reality, psychophysiology, EEG	Neuro Clinical	scott.cairney@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
Dan Denis	My research is broadly interested in the relationship between sleep and health. I use a variety of methods including detailed analysis of EEG recorded during sleep and wake, behavioural assessment on a variety of cognitive tasks, and large scale tracking of sleep and well-bring in large longitudinal datasets.	I am open to supervise any projects related to sleep and health. Examples of specific project ideas include: 1. Sleep and reality monitoring: Reality monitoring refers to our ability to distinguish between real events that happened in the external environment from things that we imagined. Reality monitoring breaks down in dissociative disorders and schizophrenia, and is impaired following sleep deprivation. This project would look at whether a night of sleep improves our ability to reality monitor compared to a similar period of time spent awake. 2. Adaptive memory biases: It is adaptive to prioritise information that allows us to achieve our goals whilst safely avoiding threats. Individuals with mood and anxiety disorders tend to underlearn positive information whilst overlearning negative information This project could use reward or fear learning tasks to examine how we prioritise and selectively remember some types of information over others. 3. Sleep, mental health, and the environment: This project would be a secondary data analysis of a dataset that recorded sleep and well-being measures over multiple weeks. The project would examine whether fluctuations in sleep and mood vary according to weather patterns.	EEG, behavioural measures, questionnaires	Neuro Clinical	dan.denis@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 this year I would be particularly keen to conduct a group project looking at consolidation and reconsolidation in word learning.	Polysomnography, behavioural measures	Neuro	gareth.gaskell@york.ac.uk
Elena Geangu	Social and emotional development during infancy and toddlerhood.	I would be happy to supervise projects on various topics that are currently addressed in my lab. A potential project could focus on understanding the impact of screen time on infant socio-cognitive development. We have a very large longitudinal dataset that could be used for this project. I am also happy to explore other project options.	Behavioural, psychophysiology, EEG, eye tracking	Dev Neuro	elena.geangu@york.ac.uk
Silvia Gennari	Event memory, psychology of time, cognitive neuroscience, language processing	I am happy to supervise projects on language processing, temporal memory, and memory for dynamic events, including the role of consolidation and sleep. Here are some examples of the kinds of projects that we can conduct in these areas 1) For students interested in development, I would like to examine production processes in adolescents. Previous studies suggest that adolescents make more mistakes than adults when verbally describing pictures, but why this is remains unclear. Production performance is also related to working memory tasks. If you want to learn this technique, we could investigate this question further using behavioural methods (eliciting descriptions from pictures) or eye-tracking. (2) Memory and Language: how descriptions of events bias our memory of those events. The same visual event can be described in different ways depending on one's perspective and prior knowledge. Similarly, different languages may place more emphasis on some aspects of events compared to others. This can be investigated in children or adults, with eye-tracking or behavioural studies. 3) For students interested in neuroimaging, I would like to examine existing data (and possibly collect more data) on the neural bases for event recollection. In this study, participants watched movies and then recalled them in the scanner. They performed a recognition task and a temporal judgment task in the scanner. The movies varied in duration and complexity so that we can correlate the movie characteristics into the BOLD response.	behavioural methods eye-tracking fMRI	Neuro Dev Clinical	Please, contact me by email if you are interested (silvia.gennari@york.ac.uk), and we can arrange a time to meet.
Karisha George	I am broadly interested in Forensic psychology	I would be keen to supervise projects related to forensic psychology, particularly: Jury decision making – there are the traditional areas of exploration here such as the impact of gender, race or attractiveness of the defendant/plaintiff. However, students should feel free to be creative and consider including additional traits such as religiosity, disability and sexual orientation. Risk factors for criminal behaviour - there are a range of factors that have been linked to antisocial tendencies such as impulsivity. Students should be prepared to consider non-traditional factors such as thinking patterns, social media activity, and the role of debated personality traits such as introversion/extraversion. Views of the Criminal Justice System - Here, students should consider exploring the public's opinions on rehabilitative programmes as well as comparisons of trust in the criminal justice systems within the US, UK and other European or Asian countries. Public views on offender risk – some example research questions in this area include: Are there some crimes that are more socially acceptable than others, and do these opinions differ based on certain traits e.g. race, gender? Does knowing about an offender’s victimization reduce ratings of their guilt?			karisha.k.george@york.ac.uk
Tom Hartley	Neural representation; spatial cognition; memory.	I am interested in the way different kinds of information are represented and processed in the brain, and especially in spatial cognition (e.g., how we find our way, how we know where we are, why do we get lost?), memory and the hippocampus. I use neuroimaging techniques together with experimental psychology and computational modelling to investigate these issues. Your project might involve neuroimaging investigations of scene processing (i.e., how we recognize places based on vision), aspects of memory or behavioural tests of these or related functions with applications to Alzheimer's Disease. With Silke Gobel and colleagues I am also working on the organization of conceptual and numerical information. If you have programming experience it may be possible to do a project involving aspects of computational modelling. Imaging and modelling projects need to be carefully planned to fit with and extend ongoing work and to ensure feasibility.	fMRI ,structural MRI, behavioural measures, computational modelling	Neuro	tom.hartley@york.ac.uk
Amanda Hickey	My main research interests are in verbal language and how we learn to use such a complex system at such a rapid pace within our everyday lives. I am also interested in the disabled student experience within Higher Education and would be happy to consider projects in this area as well as other disability/neurodiversity/developmental disorder related projects.	Language Processing Projects Our ability to use language is what makes us uniquely human, but we still don't fully understand how human language is learned or processed. For example, children seem to acquire their first language with ease, and yet as adults we find learning a new language much more difficult. One way to explore the question of how language is learnt and processed, is to teach people made up words (e.g., mof = dog, mofeem = dogs; larch = table; larcheem = tables), and see how well they learn them. By doing this we can explore what types of cognitive mechanisms underpin the learning. For instance, how much of language learning relies on implicit learning or explicit learning? Is this the same across different contexts? Is one type of learning better than the other and could we then exploit this when we learn a language? We can also test whether different training methods have an impact on initial learning, as well as long-term maintenance of the acquired knowledge. Within this project, I am interested in both typical and atypical language processing. The role of community in the disabled student experience Projects: I am currently undergoing projects considering the impact of community and a sense of belonging in the disabled student experience. While provision for disabled students within Higher Education has increased, gaps in awarding, attrition, experience and job prospects still exist between disabled and non-disabled students. It’s been argued that to fully bridge this gap, we need to build on the existing individual-based accessibility approach with a broader, community inclusive approach. As such I am interested in exploring the impact and role of community to explore and consider this argument as a way to potentially improve outcomes for disabled students within Higher Education. Projects around disabilities, neurodiversity and developmental disorders Given my above research interest I am also happy to consider other projects related to above.		Dev	amanda.hickey@york.ac.uk
Aidan Horner	Episodic memory, forgetting, sleep, spatial navigation.	I use experimental psychology, fMRI and MEG (and sometimes computational modelling) to understand how we remember and forget. I use this theoretical work to reveal how we can boost learning and retention in an educational setting (and conduct impactful research in this area). I am also interested in spatial navigation, and use virtual reality environments to understand both memory and spatial navigation. I am happy to supervise potential projects in any of these areas.	Behavioural fMRI MEG	Neuro	aidan.horner@york.ac.uk
Bailey House	I study social behaviour in adults and children. I am particularly interested in how our beliefs about what we should do influence the choices that we make.	I am interested in supervising projects related to my ongoing cross-cultural research exploring the development of (i) prosocial behaviour and (ii) children's understanding of social norms in the UK and Uganda. My research studies (in collaboration with Katie Slocombe) have measured British and Ugandan children’s behaviour in a number of different kinds of experimental tasks. For example, some tasks study children’s beliefs about how they should share, and from this we can learn how children develop an adult-like understanding of the “right” way to share. Other tasks study how children’s dependency to share is influenced by learning that other people share a lot (or not very much), and from this we can learn how children develop a tendency to conform to what others think they “should” do. From these two tasks, we can also learn whether children who are more sensitive to what others think they “should” do are ALSO more likely to have an adult-like understanding of the “right” way to share. MSci research projects that I supervise can answer these kinds of exciting research questions by coding data from videos of recorded research studies with children in both the UK and Uganda. These projects will then analyse these coded data to explore (i) the development of children’s normative sharing, and (ii) cultural differences in these aspects of child development. These studies are part of a larger collaborative project, so you would be participating in ongoing lab-wide research studies, so specific research questions would be agreed in consultation with other members of the lab. I am potentially also interested in supervising MSci projects exploring how social norms impact attitudes and behaviour in adults, using online surveys. For example, I would be interested in a project that explores how people's motivation to engage in prosocial or socially-beneficial activities (e.g. recycling, veganism, charitable giving, energy conservation) are related to (1) people's beliefs about how personally costly those activities are and (2) their beliefs about whether others approve of those activities.	Behavioural	Dev	bailey.house@york.ac.uk
Clara Humpston	I am interested in nonclinical unusual experiences in the general population, for example, transient hallucinatory phenomena and paranoid thinking. I am also interested in how disturbances in a person's sense of self may contribute to these unusual experiences and other potential mediating factors such as agency, locus of control and psychological resilience.	Schizotypal traits, individual difference, self-disturbance and sense of agency.	Questionnaires, secondary data, experimental and behaviour measures	Clinical	clara.humpston@york.ac.uk
Emma James	Learning and memory, development, language, literacy, developmental disorders	One aspect of my research uses experimental methods to understand how language learning changes across development. Some suggested project topics in this area might include: How can we optimally schedule learning and test opportunities? How does sleep support word learning from reading? Can we boost word learning through pre-testing? A second aspect of my research uses big data to understand developmental disorders of language and literacy, and the implications for education and wellbeing. Projects on related topics can make use of the Millennium Cohort Study, a longitudinal dataset of ~19,000 young people growing up in the UK. This type of project is best suited to students interested in developing advanced data skills.	Behavioural measures, secondary data analysis	Dev	emma.james@york.ac.uk
Beth Jefferies	Control of memory	Our research uses multiple methods (including individual differences research, neuroimaging and neuropsychology) to examine the cognitive mechanisms and brain networks that allow us to control our internal cognition, including our spontaneous thoughts and the way we retrieve meanings and emotions. This work seeks to understand how we suppress irrelevant interpretations of words and images, unhelpful emotional reactions and unwanted memories. These neurocognitive mechanisms are likely to be relevant to wellbeing, with difficulties in controlling thought evident in conditions such as OCD and depression. Neuro pathway students could undertake an fMRI project looking at how we control our thoughts when we are trying to do a task: what makes it hard to ignore distracting ideas that emerge from memory as opposed to distractions in the environment? Clinical pathway students could look at the effects of mood induction on thought control and/or individual differences in this ability and links with mental health. Students on the clinical pathway who are interested in clinical neuroscience might also be able to link their project to fMRI data. I am also happy to discuss other ideas in this broad area.	fMRI, MEG, TMS, Neuropsychology	Neuro Clinical	beth.jefferies@york.ac.uk
Rob Jenkins	Human Risk	Psychological factors in global catastrophic risk, including cognitive biases, mind perception, and individual differences; Effective Altruism; practical ethics 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
Kenji Kobayashi	Decision-making	I offer a group project about the relationship between stereotypes and social learning. Stereotypes, or inferences on others’ traits based on their social group membership, are well established, but little is known on how stereotyping interacts with the way we learn about their behaviour. In this project, you will collect behavioural data from a newly designed learning experiment and analyse it based on stereotype measures. If desired, those with foundational quantitative and coding skills (e.g., in Matlab or Python) may conduct computational modelling of behaviour.	Behavioural experiments	Neuro	kenji.kobayashi@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 using virtual reality to examine 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 am keen to supervise behavioural studies (with online or in person data collection) designed to further our understanding of what limits our working memory capacity, and how our ability to ignore distraction plays a role in this. We have identified that the ability to ignore different types of distraction seems to separately limit working memory capacity, and may involve separate brain mechanisms. Research is now needed to determine the extent to which these mechanisms are specific to visuo-spatial working memory, or are “domain-general”, as well as how these mechanisms shape working memory throughout the lifespan, and also in ADHD. I am also interested in how playing certain video games might improve working memory and distractor resistance.	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? Does mothers' mind-mindedness in early childhood predict their children's mind-mindedness in early adulthood?	Behavioural data coding, questionnaires, secondary data analysis	Dev Clinical	elizabeth.meins@york.ac.uk
Tony Morland	Understanding the human visual system, with a particular interest in using fMRI.	This year we are exploring how the human visual system processes colour. We will use precision fMRI (a high resolution approach) to understand how the visual cortex precesses signals arising in the cone photoreceptors. We aim to uncover relationships between the responses we measure and how people perceive colour.	Techniques: fMRI and behaviour	Neuro	antony.morland@york.ac.uk
Maryann Noonan	Learning, decision making, attention, social cognition, adolescent development.	In one area of my research I use behavioural and neuroimaging techniques, alongside computational modelling, to understand how we learn and make decisions. This work includes examining how these behavioural and neural mechanisms emerge across adolescence and how they may link to individual differences in adolescent onset mental health conditions. Projects could involve gaining experience in any, or a combination of the following methods; online, lab- or school-based behavioural testing, primary neuroimaging data collection or the analysis of secondary neuroimaging data from the Human Connectome Project. Some project topics in these areas might include: How do prefrontal subregions and their connections mature How do children and adolescents learn the consequences of positive and negative feedback? How does the development of the prefrontal cortex affect the emergence of decision-making computations involved in social and risk processing? Does functional and structural connectivity between key neural nodes of brain circuits involved in decision making predict subclinical variation in adolescent mental health? I would also be happy to supervise projects in areas related to my other interests in attentional control and social cognition.	Behavioural, neuroimaging (MRI, fMRI, DWI).	Dev Neuro	maryann.noonan@york.ac.uk
Harriet Over	Social Psychology	I am happy to supervise projects in the following areas: Understanding how to enhance prosocial behaviour, for example charitable giving Examining social psychological theories of dehumanization Exploring the perceived value of animals and people	Experimental methods and questionnaires		harriet.over@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, which I find tends to work most effectively as a group project. Titles of recent projects I've supervised include: #Bodypositive: ‘Body positivity promoting’ imagery on Instagram and its effects on young women The Influence of Gender and Obsessive-compulsive Thoughts upon the Development of Exercise Fixations Personality Traits and their Influence on Exercise Addiction and Appearance Management Internal vs. External Jogging: Comparing Exercise and Humour for Improving Affect Eating behaviour and Somatic Awareness: Is Self-Compassion a factor in both men and women? The effects of Familiarity and Information on Attitudes towards Mental and Physical Disorders. Generalisation of Attentional Focus on Food Intake to Related Activities An Investigation Into The Effects Of Cognitive Challenge On Snack Food Preference. Getting the timing right: effects of the scent of lavender on psychological state 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
David Pitcher	I am interested in two areas, Clinical neuroscience and the neural basis of social perception.	I am currently running two projects. One is cognitive neuroscience; the other is clinical cognitive neuroscience. Both projects will involve TMS and fMRI so if you are interested in learning two methods please email to find out more. Cognitive Neuroscience. This project will be a combined TMS / fMRI project on social processing in the human brain (notably the STS). Subjects will be scanned while watching socially engaging videos before and after TMS is delivered over the STS. Clinical Cognitive Neuroscience. I will also be running a combined TMS / fMRI project on facial expressions and how these may differ in participants with anxiety and depression. This project will involve analysing fMRI data before and after TMS is delivered to map the causal disruption across the entire brain.	fMRI, TMS, Neuropsychology	Neuro Clinical	david.pitcher@york.ac.uk
Catherine Preston	I am interested in how the experience of the body influences mental health and well being. I also have a general interest in body perception and fundamental principles of body ownership.	I would like to offer a neuroimaging project in collaboration with Prof. Daniel Baker using MEG to examine interoception during pregnancy. Here we aim to measure cortical responses to maternal and fetal heartbeats in pregnant individuals, linking this to measues of subjective bonding to the fetus. I am also happy to offer other projects on the following topics: - examining perinatal body experience in autism or in relation to infant feeding (extended breastfeeding/ formula feeding) using psychometric or qualitative approaches. - Behavioural studies examining interoception (heartbeat detection/ mindfulness interoception) and bodily experience. - Using multisensory body illusions (e.g. the rubber hand illusion) to examine fundamental principles of body ownership.	MEG, fMRI, Behavioural, Clinical, Scale Development, Qualitative	Neuro Clinical Dev	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.uk
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 can offer the following dog project: 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. Depending on how many people want to work together on this project we could then examine the accuracy of humans in detecting valence, arousal and context from the 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). I can offer the following developmental project: Cross cultural infant development. This project would involve coding and analysing data from our existing longitudinal data set collected in UK and rural Uganda, which offers an exciting insight into differences in the early social environment of infants in these two cultural contexts. This project would be focussed on understanding the importance and predictive power of early engagement in joint attention (infant and caregiver jointly attending to an interesting event) for later cognition. We have data from various behavioural experiments to examine joint attention in infants when they were 10-21 months old. You would code the video data for joint attention events and skills and then test whether joint attention performance predicts other aspects of cognition that we measured in infancy or early childhood (e.g. Language development, cooperation, social norm understanding – you would have the choice of what to focus on here). You will be trained on the use of Observer video coding software and work with other 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)
Layla Unger	Language, word learning, memory, conceptual knowledge, categorisation and category learning, attention	Broadly, I'm interested in how we learn to think and communicate about the world around us just from our everyday experiences. This includes how we learn words, distill the vast variety of different things we encounter into simple categories and concepts (e.g., dog, chair), and form memories. I particularly study the evolution of these processes across childhood and into adulthood. Some examples of research topics I'd be happy to supervise are: (1) We somehow learn thousands of words just from the day-to-day language we hear and read, without needing a dictionary or teacher to tell us their definitions. How do we accomplish this? What information/processes do we use to pick up new words with seemingly little effort? (2) AI has achieved remarkable success in mimicking human language fluency. Do the processes that AI uses also take place during human language learning or processing? (3) How do we learn to group different things into categories? Does learning to group things into categories influence the way we perceive them? (4) Every experience is at least a little bit different from every other one, yet we manage to integrate our memories of these experiences together to form a coherent mental representation of the world. How do we connect different but overlapping memories, such as different experiences that involved the same person?	Behavioural experiments, eye tracking, analysis of language datasets	Dev	layla.unger@york.ac.uk
Maurice Waddle
Alex Wade	Vision, decision making, consciousness	Consciousness and decision making using the International Brain Laboratory task I am collaborating with a large, multinational group that are interested in how we make decisions based on visual information. In other words, how does information pass from your eye to the visual cortex and then to the bit of the brain that makes a response? This seems like a simple question but it bridges an entire field of neuroscience from early vision right through to consciousness. Much of this work has been done on mice to date but there are now efforts to start work on human experiments. This will be one of the first projects in the world to use the standard International Brain Laboratory (https://www.internationalbrainlab.com/) task in a human neuroimaging experiment. We will use MRI and MEG combined with traditional behavioural experiments to trace the flow of neuronal information in a target detection task through the brain with millisecond resolution. As well as our own data, we will have access to multielectrode array data from the IBL and would work with collaborators in Cambridge and the Netherlands. This project would suit students with an interest in neuroimaging and neuroscience as a career.	Behavioural measures, computational modelling, MRI, fMRI, MEG	Neuro	I would be delighted to discuss this either in person or by email: alex.wade@york.ac.uk
David Zendle	For some people, and at some times, interaction with digital technology (e.g. social media, gaming, online gambling) leads to important positive or negative outcomes. My general interest is using very large traces of human digital behaviour to identify and quantify where the most meaningful of these effects are.	I am happy to supervise projects which deal with the impact of digital content on a variety of psychosocial outcomes. My particular expertise lies in using large-scale secondary data (e.g. people's YouTube histories, large-scale behavioural datasets gleaned from APIs) to understand both the prevalence of different kinds of technology, and the potential impact of such technology on society. I am particularly interested in the idea that the relationship between wellbeing and social media may be dependent not just on the volume of content consumed, but the kind of content consumed. I am also interested in a variety of topics relating to video games and wellbeing, with particular reference to both social aspects of gaming and gaming monetisation. Projects could both estimate the prevalence and nature of different kinds of digital content with which there is a hypothesised link with mental health; and potentially go further to attempt to estimate these relationships.	Behavioural measures, Secondary data analysis, Digital trace data.		david.zendle@york.ac.uk