MSci Projects - Potential Supervisors 2025-26

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

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

Clinical

Behavioural measures. 

Neuro

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

Current Project: 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.

Neuro

Clinical

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.

Neuro

Clinical

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.

Neuro

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.

Current Project: 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.

Dev

Neuro

Event memory, psychology of time, cognitive neuroscience, language processing

I am happy to supervise projects on any aspect of linguistic stimuli, temporal memory, or episodic memory, including the role of consolidation. IF you have an idea, I am happy to discuss with you.

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 or healthy elderly adults. Previous studies suggest that adolescents make more mistakes than adults when verbally describing pictures, but why this is remains unclear. 

2) For students interested in neuroimaging, I would like to examine existing data on the neural bases for event recognition. In this study, participants watched movies before scanning. They then performed a recognition task and a temporal judgment task in the scanner. 

3) Interaction of language and memory: Previous studies have shown that labelling images leads to poorer recognition memory than indicating preferences. This study uses eye-tracking to investigate how labelling vs preference modulates overt attention during encoding and recollection. Additionally, it will investigate whether attention during encoding can predict subsequent memory performance.

behavioural methods

eye-tracking

fMRI

Neuro

Dev

Clinical

Behavioural

fMRI

MEG

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.

Dev

Current Project: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Dev

Clinical

I am happy to supervise projects in the following areas:

1. Impact of risk or resilience factors (e.g. coping mechanisms, exercise, childhood experiences) on stress perception and/or physiology.
2. Understanding schizotypy and its relationship with e.g. creativity, mindfulness, executive function.  
3. 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

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

Clinical

gavin.phillips@york.ac.uk 

I am interested in two areas, Clinical neuroscience and the neural basis of social perception.

 I am running a project on the neural basis of emotion processing in clinical disorders. This involves an fMRI experiment in which subjects will match facial expressions and we will measure the neural response across the entire brain. We will then correlate these results with different questionnaire, designed to measure, autism, depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. If you're interested, please contact me for more information.

Neuro

Clinical

Neuro

Clinical

Dev

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I would be delighted to discuss this either in person or by email:

alex.wade@york.ac.uk