PhD Students

Courtney Mansfield – (2020-2024)

Courtney is using neuroimaging techniques (fMRI, EEG) and psychophysics to investigate how both early (V1) and later (IT) visual regions in the brain process objects under real-world occlusion, including testing Predictive Processing accounts of visual processing.

Kerri Bailey – ‘Decoding cross-modal information in early somatosensory cortex‘ (2016:2020)

Kerri used fMRI (and EEG) to investigate the information carried via cross-modal connections between auditory cortex and primary somatosensory areas of the brain. She has shown that hand-regions of early somatosensory areas discriminate the content of sounds that depict hand-actions (e.g. typing on a keyboard Vs knocking a door) but not the content of control sound categories (animal vocalizations or pure tones).

Paul Kennedy – ‘Social Functioning in At Risk and First Episode Psychosis’ (2016-2019)

Paul was a clinical psychology trainee who investigated how deficits in social cognition – particularly emotion recognition – may be linked to psychosis. Co-supervised with colleagues in Clinical Psychology here at UEA.

Vicky Adams – ‘Decoding high level influences in facial expression recognition’ (2014: 2018)

Vicky used fMRI and EEG to investigate high level influences on emotion recognition. Vicky has shown that primary visual cortex surprisingly carries information regarding occluded parts of faces, e.g. a face with the eyes hidden.

Masters Students

I am interested in supervising students on a wide array of topics related to my research interests in Cognitive Neuroscience and Perception. In particular working on neuroimaging projects is feasible for Masters students (e.g. fMRI analysis or data collection, EEG).

Jordan Ayden, MSc Cognitive Neuroscience – The impact of trait anxiety on predictive processing mechanisms in visual perception (2020-2021)

Ebony Baker, MSc Cognitive Neuroscience – How do individuals high in empathy differ at occluded emotion recognition?(2019-2021)

Courtney Mansfield, MSc Cognitive Neuroscience  – A multi-arrangment similarity rating study of real-world object recognition under occlusion (2019-2020).

Siman Salah, MSc Cognitive Neuroscience – Exploring possible impairments in top-down visual processing in psychosis and autism (2018-2019)

Dominic Mclean, MSc Cognitive Neuroscience – Post Encoding Elimination of the Own-Ethnicity Bias: The Use of Pre-Retrieval Manipulations to Increase Holistic Processing of Other-Ethnicity Faces (2015-2017).

Kerri Bailey – MSc Cognitive Neuroscience – An EEG Study to show the N170 is amplified for eye-sensitive emotions when the eyes are occluded from view (2015-2016)

Filip Simofy – MRes Psychology – Configural and Featural Processing of facial emotion expressions in psychometically defined schizotypy (2015-2016)

Laila Ramsi – MSc Cognitive Neuroscience – How culture effects recognition of Self-Conscious Emotions (2016-2017)

Some Undergraduate Dissertation Titles

Top Down Modulation of Expression Recognition in Primary Visual Cortex

Investigating the nature of cross-modal activity in early somatosensory cortex

Emotion Recognition of facial Expressions and schizotypal personality

Facial Emotion Recognition in a Non-institutionalized population possessing primary and secondary psychopathic traits

Facial and vocal emotion recognition and psychopathy traits in a non-clinical sample

The effect of stress and anxiety on emotion recognition in the central and peripheral visual fields

Emotion Perception across the visual field and effects of empathy

Turn that frown upside down: a study on inversion and emotion recogntion

Effect of Cognitive Bias Modification via smartphones on measures of affect and anxiety

The influence of background valence on the face in the crowd effect

The possible relationship between empathy and affective priming

An investigation into the role of anxiety and social anxiety on the recognition of facial expressions