"Cognitive processing of personal property"

Dr. Andrew Bayliss
A deep-seated sense of ‘ownership' over objects and space emerges early in life and greatly influences our individual and social behaviour. Recent work has shown that physical objects that are self-owned are afforded prioritised memory, attentional and motoric processing. This project will focus on the analysis of physical and simulated interactions with objects that are ascribed ownership statuses. The project will determine the extent to which attentional, motoric and spatial processing contributes to the shaping of our behavioural interactions with property. Some key considerations will be to 1) investigate the representation of objects that are owned by the self compared with those owned by other individuals, 2) determine the influence of property on spatial representations and 3) begin to investigate the neural basis of object ownership. The applicant will have a background in experimental psychology (e.g. perception and action) or social neuroscience and experience with at least one of the following techniques: Motion capture, eyetracking, EEG, TMS or fMRI.

"Differentiating fear and anxiety"

Professor Phillip Corr
This research revolves around three major systems of defence and approach motivation and behaviour: (a) the Fight-Flight Freeze System (FFFS; fear-related), the Behavioural Inhibition System (BIS; anxiety-related), and the Behavioural Approach System (BAS; hope/pleasure-related) – these systems form part of what is now known as the Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (RST) of personality. Recent research has been devoted to finding out whether the emotions of fear and anxiety are separable emotional states, or whether they exist in a continuum. Research in this Group has contributed to this debate, and continues to throw light upon this long-running debate in clinical psychology and psychiatry. The project involves questionnaire-based research centred on the measurement of basic emotion and motivational systems, specifically those related to human personality and various forms of psychopathology.

"Comorbidity of ADHD and reading disability"

Dr. Paul Engelhardt
The goal of this study is to understand the cognitive deficits that underlie reading comprehension deficits in ADHD and reading disability [RD]. Combined these disorders affect between 9%-14% of the population. ADHD is typically associated with deficits in response inhibition, and RD is typically associated with deficits in phonological processing. Existing studies of reading in ADHD and RD have almost exclusively focused on single-word reading rather than sentence-level comprehension. However, comprehending sentences requires the ability to integrate words together into hierarchically structured phrases in order to extract compositional meaning. The proposed study will test participants on a battery of neuropsychological and executive function measures and three eye-movement experiments focused on sentence comprehension. The eye tracking tasks will manipulate several variables, and assess participants' understanding via comprehension questions. By comparing typically-developing individuals to ADHD, RD, and a comorbid group, the goal of this project is to determine whether reading difficulties stem from slow processing speed, executive dysfunction, and/or working memory. Participants will complete multiple measures of sentence comprehension and a range of executive function tasks. These will be combined with clinical measurements and symptom severity scores in order to understand the cognitive profile of ADHD and RD, and how deficits specifically impact on syntactic processing abilities.

"Fathers of very low birth weight infants"

Professor Margaret O'Brien
More very low birth weight infants (<1500g; VLBW) are surviving, creating a need for higher levels of medical and nursing care from professionals and family care from parents. To date, most research on the family factors has focused on maternal adaptation. Less is known about how fathers cope with the birth of VLBW premature infants or how they manage later when these infants are discharged home. The proposed study aims to investigate the parenting, spousal and mental health profiles of fathers after the birth of VLBW infants. A prospective research design will follow mother and father couples of VLBW infants and a control group admitted to the NICU unit at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital (N&NUH) over a six month period. Primary data collection will be supplemented by a secondary data analysis of paternal health and wellbeing in the antenatal and postnatal period from the first wave of UK's Life Birth Cohort.

"Embodied cognition and social identity"

Dr. Charles Seger
An ambitious student will work at the intersection of Social Embodiment, Social Identity, and Intergroup Contact. Minimal forms of intergroup contact, such as imagery and extended contact, have been shown to increase positivity towards an outgroup. Physical states, present in the self or others, influence our thinking (embodied cognition) and our perceptions of others. My research group is at the forefront of extending our knowledge of embodied processes into realm of social identity and intergroup relations; recent works include interpersonal touch and food sharing. The successful student may study how embodied acts, such as materials sharing, interpersonal touch, social gaze, and synchrony, will influence our judgments about other individuals and groups. This may include social-cognitive processes such as attention, self-other overlap, and social processes such as ingroup identification. Dependent measures may include measures of subtle and overt behaviour in an intergroup context, potentially including economic games. Students will have the opportunity to utilise eye-tracking equipment, motion-tracking software and physiological recording equipment.

"Perceived object size during grasping"

Dr. Irene Sperandio
Size constancy is the ability of our visual system to perceive an object as having the same size even though its image on the retina varies with distance. In a recent neuroimaging study (Sperandio et al, Nature Neurosci, 2012), I demonstrated that primary visual cortex (V1), which is the first ‘weigh-station' in the processing of visual information, plays a crucial role in size constancy. This mechanism is also necessary for goal-directed actions such as grasping. Remarkably, the neural mechanisms underlying size constancy for action are poorly understood. With the present study, we will investigate how size constancy is encoded in brain regions beyond V1. We will carry out behavioural and fMRI studies while participants grasp or judge the size of objects within their reachable space. The objects will be positioned at varying distances such that their retinal size will either match or differ systematically. Perceptual judgments and grasp kinematics will be recorded by a motion capture system. Analyses of the fMRI signal will identify regions that represent perceived size during action and perception. A better understanding of these neural mechanisms will help to explain why human beings are capable of grasping objects with exquisite accuracy, an unsolved question in neuroscience.