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.

The bottom table details Cognitive Neuroscience projects which are open to students on the Neuroscience pathway ONLY.

In week 7, we will send out a google form for you to complete where you can state your supervisor/project preferences. We have moved the deadline for submitting your preference to the Wednesday of Week 8 of this Semester (2nd of April). Do remember we do not allocate supervisors on a first come first served basis, so there is no advantage in completing the form early.

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 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
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
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
Scott Cairney	Transforming the emotional meaning of memories in sleep	Sleep facilitates memory consolidation by reactivating recently learned experiences. Memory reactivation can be triggered during sleep by re-exposing people to auditory memory cues while they nap. This study will examine whether the emotional meaning of memories (e.g., their positive or negative tone) can be modified via cued memory reactivation during sleep.	PSG (nap study)	Neuro	scott.cairney@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 are two specific projects: 1) Previous studies have shown that information about new words is better remembered if some part of that information was retrieved during learning (retrieval practice). This study will explore the EEG correlates of this phenomena, providing new insights into how retrieval practice supports word learning. 2) 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	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	silvia.gennari@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
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
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 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 can 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? 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
Kyla Pennington	Stress, executive function, schizotypy, mindfulness.	I am happy to supervise projects in the following areas: Impact of risk or resilience factors (e.g. coping mechanisms, exercise, childhood experiences) on stress perception and/or physiology. Understanding schizotypy and its relationship with e.g. creativity, mindfulness, executive function. Short intervention studies to reduce stress perception and/or physiological signs of burnout/stress.	psychophysiological methods e.g. EDA, ECG, PPG either in lab or from wearables. Questionnaires, cognitive tasks and 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.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 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: (1) Can dog owners predict their dogs' social cognition skills? This project aims to understand whether dog owners understand their own dogs' social cognition. In this project, we will be testing adult dogs on a battery of social cognition tasks, including: sensitivity to human gestural and vocal communication and social problem solving. Dog owners will then be provided with a pre-established questionnaire where they will be asked questions about their dogs' socio-cognitive abilities. The aim is to examine whether there is a relationship between the dogs performance on the behavioural social cognition tasks and owner score on the social cognition questionnaire. (2) Puppy sensitivity to speech register This project aims to understand at what age puppies are sensitive to and show a preference for individuals who produce dog-directed speech (DDS) (high-pitched, prosodic voice - e.g. “who’s a good dog?”) vs adult-directed speech. Our previous research has found that adult dogs prefer DDS to ADS, but its not clear if this is an innate preference evolved through domestication or a learnt through experience. You would code videos from litters of puppies we have already tested and hopefully help to test more litters in the Autumn semester (subject to us finding willing breeders!). (3) 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). ALL DOG PROJECTS: Since this project involves working with dogs or puppies, it is essential that you are confident with dogs and have experience interacting safely with them. For Projects 1 and 2, the in-person testing is likely to take place at a local dog daycare centre or a breeder’s home whereby we are restricted to their timetable, so it is essential you are flexible to maximise all testing opportunities. Due to the time to set up the equipment testing sessions can be long (4hours) and travel for puppies could add another 1 hour+ at either end of testing, so again flexibility is required. 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 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	I am happy to supervise projects on my general interest topics, and can offer the following specific projects: (1) People are much more likely to learn words from reading text than from watching video. But, perhaps video can still support word learning. Imagine that you're about to read a text about a new topic that's very unfamiliar (like glass blowing or quantum physics). You might be more likely to learn the new vocabulary terms in the text if you first get to watch a video that familiarises you with the topic, even if the video doesn't help you learn the terms themselves. This project would be designed to test whether video can support word learning in this way. (2) Categories like dog, cup and chair anchor our knowledge about the world around us and guide how we perceive and interact with it. How do everyday "incidental" experiences, like passing dogs on the street, shape our knowledge about categories? This project will look at what kinds of knowledge about categories people might implicitly pick up on just from incidental exposure. The project will use eye tracking to probe implicit knowledge, and potentially examine how this knowledge builds up as people get repeated incidental exposures over multiple days with opportunities for the consolidation of knowledge during sleep. (3) While reading or having a conversation, you might sometimes get the sense that you're predicting upcoming words that you're going to read or hear next. Indeed, making predictions and learning from incorrect predictions is how AI models of language (like chatGPT) are able to mimic human language fluency. In addition to forward looking predictions, do our minds also make backwards looking "retrodictions" in which we use what we're hearing or reading right now to update our sense of what we heard or read in the recent past? This project will contrast the roles of prediction and retrodiction in language processing, with a focus on word learning. If the student is interested in eye tracking, the project could use eye tracking to examine language processing during reading.	Behavioural experiments, eye tracking, analysis of language datasets	Dev	layla.unger@york.ac.uk

MSci Projects in Cognitive Neuroscience

Please note, only students taking the Neuroscience pathway can participate in these projects.

Supervisor	Project Number	Project Title	Project Details	Data Collection	YNiC Scanning Facilities used?
Dan Denis	1	Neural mechanisms of reward memory formation	When we encounter something we find rewarding (e.g. finding a great coffee shop in a new city), we want to remember not just the reward itself but also the otherwise mundane events that led up to it (such as the streets we walked down to get to the shop). How does the brain retroactively prioritise this initially unimportant information when confronted with a later reward? This MEG project will test the hypothesis that upon encountering something rewarding, the brain will rapidly replay the sequence of events that led up to the reward, allowing us to form a coherent representation of personally rewarding experiences.	MEG	Yes
Rebecca Jackson	2	The neural correlates of control over language	Language and executive control have traditionally been considered distinct, affecting our understanding of intelligence and the nature of thought. However, the identification of a set of brain regions specifically involved in the executive control of meaningful, semantic stimuli has challenged this separation. To understand why, we must explore the factors that dictate the functional organisation of control regions. To what extent is this network preferentially engaged for meaningful versus verbal stimuli when performing the same controlled task processes? This project will use fMRI to disentangle the effects of meaning and language on the brain regions involved in executively controlled behaviour.	MRI	Yes
Emma James	3	Neural mechanisms of schema effects in word learning	How does the brain transform new words into long-term memory? This project explores the roles of prior knowledge (“schemas”) and sleep in memory consolidation. Using fMRI, we will examine how the brain encodes new words that do and do not link to prior knowledge, and how these patterns predict memory retention before and after sleep.	MRI	Yes
Tony Morland	4	Brain changes associated with visual loss caused by macular degeneration	We will use the hcp data set on visual loss https://www.humanconnectome.org/study/changes-visual-cortical-connectivity-following-central-visual-field-loss to assess anatomical brain changes in a group of individuals with macular degeneration.	Analysis of existing data	Existing Data

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