Background
I did an undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science at UCLA,
where I worked with Keith Holyoak on analogical reasoning
and with Nancy Kanwisher on visual attention. I then moved
to Princeton for my PhD with Anne Treisman, also on visual
attention. The next two years I spent in Nancy
Kanwisher’s lab at MIT, where I began doing fMRI
research on attention and on the organisation of visual
cortex. Since 2000 I have been on the faculty of the School
of Psychology at Bangor University, where I am a member of
the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience.
Since 2008 I have been Research Director of the
College of Health and Behavioural
Sciences, of which Psychology is a member School.
Research
At the broadest level, I am interested in understanding how
the brain deals with one of its most complex problems --
understanding other people. With my students and colleagues
we have focused on the earlier perceptual stages of this
process, such as how people perceive faces and bodies and
their movements. In collaboration with Nick Oosterhof and Steve Tipper, I've extended this
research into studies of the shared visual/motor
representations of bodily actions. Still more
recently, Kim Graham and I have developed a line
of work comparing and contrasting the perceptual
functions of extrastriate cortex and the medial
temporal cortex.
In terms of methods, our main research tool has been and
continues to be fMRI; our studies use traditional blocked
and event-related designs, and, more recently, multivoxel
pattern analysis approaches. Recently I have also
collaborated on ERP studies of body and face perception
with Guillaume Thierry, and I am working a new line of
research with Martijn van Koningbruggen, Marius Peelen, and
Francesca Perini that uses TMS and fMRI conjointly to study
person and action perception.
Our research is currently funded by BBSRC. Recent grants
came from the ESRC, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Wales
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Teaching
I have taught undergraduate modules on a wide variety of
topics, including human neuropsychology, memory, reasoning
and decision making, cognitive neuroscience, and the
"social brain". At the master's level I have led seminar
classes on current issues in the neuroscience of high-level
vision. An important part of my teaching involves the
supervision of undergraduate student projects, which I
especially enjoy. Project groups from previous years have
investigated such topics as visual attention, the neural
basis of scene perception, and how extended affective
experiences are represented in memory. Current students are
looking at plasticity in the sensorimotor cortex and
illusions of body perception. I have also enjoyed
supervising a number of MSc thesis projects, four of which
have resulted in published articles.
My full CV is available
here. PDFs of most papers are available
here.
