List of project supervisors
This list is not finalised. I still don’t have a definitive list of supervisors for next
year. However, the list here should be very close indeed. There may be some
additions, but not many. I will notify you as soon as any changes are made.
I cannot therefore say for sure when you will be asked to make a selection.
However, at the moment midday Tuesday of week 10 is a possibility. Please keep
reading your University email. Again, I will tell you as soon as I know.
When we ask you to indicate preferences, you will be sent a link to an online
form. You will be asked to rank in order of preference all of the supervisors.
In the meantime, please start to consider the choices listed. Please don’t invest a
huge amount of time researching a particular topic listed here before allocation,
as you can not be sure you will be able to follow it up. You may be allocated a
different supervisor.
You are encouraged to work as a pair. If you have a partner, you will make one
single joint ranking.
You are encouraged to contact potential supervisors if you have any questions,
either by email (which may be the most practical method at this point) or, for
example, by attending their office hours.
George Dunbar 16th June 2015
Helen Brown (One pair)
General:
I would be happy to supervise projects in any of the following areas
(1) First or second language learning in both children and adults
(2) Changes in learning and memory across the lifespan
(3) Effects of sleep on learning and memory
Specific:
(1) If new words or grammatical structures have been learned, does a period of sleep
affect the way that they are processed? Are the effects of sleep the same in different
age groups?
(2) Do children/adults learn new words or grammatical structures better from different
types of input (e.g., story book, video, spoken language with no visual context)?
George Dunbar (F)
General
Word meaning and language understanding; pedestrian safety; food labelling,
cognitive modelling
Specific
What makes puns funny?
Parent-child communication
Evaluating road safety information.
Modal choice in transport: Why do people travel to University by bus / car etc.? Why
don’t people cycle or walk for short journeys?
Who uses food labels, and when?
Corey Fincher (H)
General
Individual differences in pathogen avoidance, life history strategy, cultural ecology,
evolutionary psychology
Specific
Do people that have high levels of hygiene behaviour also exhibit greater anti-parasite
behaviour? Do people concerned about pathogens have preferences for simple
habitats?
Thomas Hills (F)
General
Evolutionary Psychology (aka Sex and Death); Language, Learning and Memory;
Superstition; Persuasion and Influence.
Specific
Working memory and long-term memory retrieval
Working memory and information search
Kita (F)
General Topic
The role of hand gestures in communication, thinking and language learning.
Specific Topics
Some example questions we could pursue are as follows. I am open to other
suggestions, within the general topic.
- How are gesture and speech production processes inter-related? (Chu, et al., 2014,
Kita & Davis, 2009)
- Do gestures have self-oriented (as opposed communicative) functions? If so, what is
the nature of such functions? (Kita & Davies, 2009; Alibali et al., 2011)
- How do we integrate information from speech and gesture in comprehension?
(Cocks et al. 2011)
- Does accompanying gestures facilitate word learning in children? (Mumford & Kita,
in press)
- What is the relationship between language and gesture development? (Iverson &
Goldin-Meadow, 2005)
- How does the ability to integrate speech and gesture (in production and
comprehension) develop in children? (see the ageing paper by Cocks, et al. 2011)
- How do babies pointing gesture production relate to their language and social
development?
References
Alibali, M. W., Spencer, R. C., Knox, L., & Kita, S. (2011). Spontaneous Gestures
Influence Strategy Choices in Problem Solving. Psychological Science, 22(9), 11381144. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797611417722
Chu, M., Meyer, A., Foulkes, L., & Kita, S. (2014). Individual differences in
frequency and saliency of speech-accompanying gestures: The role of cognitive
abilities and empathy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(2), 694-709.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0033861
Cocks, N., Morgan, G., & Kita, S. (2011). Iconic gesture and speech integration in
younger and older adults. Gesture, 11(1), 24-39.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/gest.11.1.02coc
Iverson, J. M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2005). Gesture paves the way for language
development. Psychological Science, 16(5), 367-371.
Kita, S., & Davies, T. S. (2009). Competing conceptual representations trigger cospeech representational gestures. Language and Cognitive Processes, 24(5), 761-775.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01690960802327971
Mumford, K. H., & Kita, S. (in press). Children Use Gesture to Interpret Novel Verb
Meanings. Child Development.doi: 10.1111/cdev.12188
Elliot Ludvig (H)
General Topic: How people learn to make decisions through reward and punishment
Sub-Topic #1: Gambling and Risky Choice
Example questions: What makes people gamble? How do they make decisions
between risky or ambiguous options? How are those choices influenced by cognitive
biases, such as the hot-hand fallacy, near-miss effect, or the misweighting of
probabilities? What individual characteristics are predictive as to how much people
gamble?
Sub-Topic #2: Moral Decision Making
Example questions: What are the effects of distraction or cognitive load on moral
decisions? How do moral decisions resemble and/or differ from more common
economic decisions? How does the framing of questions/actions affect the degree of
giving in ultimatum or dictator games? Can rewarding feedback alter preferences in
moral dilemmas, such as the trolley problem?
Sub-Topic #3: The Value of Information
Example questions: How do people gather information about rewards in their
environment? How do they trade-off between the need to explore new options and the
potential to exploit known options? When the world changes, how do people integrate
new information gathered with existing knowledge? How do people decide what to
learn about? Do humans resemble other animals in the way they search/forage for
rewards?
Anyone interested in these topics should feel free to approach me to discuss further.
Fiona MacCallum (Update 19.6.15 Will not be supervising 2015-16)
Elizabeth Maylor (F)
General:
Cognitive changes in normal human ageing
Specific:
I have several specific suggestions for projects on ageing memory. These mostly
involve individual testing of healthy young (18-30 years) and older (65-80 years)
adults using (your own) laptop computers, , though it is, of course, not essential for
you to own a laptop to do a project with me. As recruiting older adults can be a
challenge for students, it is strongly recommended that my projects are tackled in
pairs to ensure adequate sample sizes.
For examples of recent studies from my lab, some co-authored by project students,
take a look at my webpage:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/psych/people/emaylor/emaylor/
Kate Messenger (H)
General Areas:
I have made some specific project suggestions related to my own research on
syntactic priming but I am happy to supervise projects on any areas of
psycholinguistics or language acquisition; students interested in any of these areas are
also encouraged to propose their own project ideas.
Syntactic priming: Speakers tend to repeat language that they have just heard. They
don't just repeat the words they hear, they also repeat language at the abstract level of
sentence structures and phrases.
This phenomenon was first observed in analyses of transcripts of a bank robbery
(Schenkein, 1980): One robber complained, "Cor the noise downstairs, you’ve got to
hear and witness it to realise how bad it is," and his lookout repeated the same
sentence structure in his reply "You have got to experience exactly the same position
as me, mate, to understand how I feel."
By examining what bits of language different groups of speakers repeat in what
circumstances we can learn about the kind of underlying mental representations for
language they have. Some potential areas for investigation are:
(1) priming effects tend to vary widely between individuals - what factors (linguistic
or cognitive) can explain this variation?
(2) do priming effects reflect implicit learning or short-term activation of
representations?
(3) how do speakers of two or more languages store and represent these languages?
Can hearing a sentence structure in one language prime the same sentence structure in
the other language? What if the speaker is a second language learner - does priming
depend on level of proficiency/fluency with each language?
Many of these areas can be investigated with adult and child participants. Projects
investigating topics with children would require students to recruit nurseries to
conduct experiments in and projects investigating bilingual or second language
learners would require students to have access to the appropriate population; these
projects may be easier for students working in pairs to complete.
Suggested Reading:
Branigan, H. (2007). Syntactic priming. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1, 1-16.
OR
Pickering, M. J., & Ferreira, V. S. (2008). Structural priming: A critical review.
Psychological Bulletin, 134(3), 427-459.
Schenkein, J. 1980. A taxonomy for repeating action sequences in natural
conversation. In B. Butterworth (Ed.), Language production,Vol. 1 (pp. 21–47).
London: Academic Press.
Adrian von Muhlenen (H)
General Topics
Visual perception and attention; effects of mood on cognitive processes, effects of eye
blinks on visual memory, effects of IQ and personality on attention; attention capture;
visual masking; user experience and ergonomic design.
More specific Topics
1) Does mood influence your speed of perception?
Recent studies suggest that mood can affect the width of the attentional focus. But do
such changes in the spatial resolution come along with changes in the temporal
resolution? One way of measuring the speed of perception involves the Rapid Serial
Visual Presentation (RSVP) of stimuli, such as pictures, letters, or numbers. Does sad
mood affect recognition in such a RSVP task?
2) How can you keep track of where attention has been in a dynamic display?
When searching for a target in a complex visual display, one usually keeps track of
where attention has been, in order to avoid re-checking stimuli that have already been
looked at. However, what happens in a display where stimuli are not static, but move
around? Recent findings suggest that performance in these dynamic displays is not
worse than in static displays. How can this surprising finding be explained?
3) Where do your eyes move when several visual events occur at the same time?
Certain events, such as the onset of a new object, always capture attention irrespective
of the current task. However, it is not clear whether one can pay attention to several
events when they occur simultaneously. Some theories suggest that the visual system
can prioritize up to four events. However our own findings suggest that only one
event is prioritized. Tracking eye movements could provide the ultimate answer to
this question.
4) How do you notice changes that occur during an eye blink?
When a change in the visual field occurs while the eyes are closed (e.g., during an eye
blink) it is in fact invisible, as it is not associated with a unique luminance transient.
The aim of this project is to establish if this effect depends on the nature of the current
task and on the nature of the change.
5) Is IQ or personality linked to how we perceive things or attend to things?
Little work has addressed the role of individual differences on the processing of visual
information and attention. Nonetheless, our ability to see and attend to visual
information can have far-reaching consequences (e.g., consider driving performance,
medical image screening and monitoring of critical system industrial interfaces). The
aim of this project is to examine the effect of different personality traits and of IQ on
our ability to ignore irrelevant information and to focus on new information.
Kate Roberts (H)
General:
My research focuses on auditory attention: how we are able to listen out for sounds of
interest and ignore background noise. Early attention researched used the dichotic
listening paradigm to investigate how we can listen to one stream of information and
ignore another, but since then the majority of attention research has looked at the
influence of attention on visual perception. We now know a great deal about how
attention influences how we see the world, but less about how attention influences
how we hear the world. How can we use our knowledge of visual attention to learn
more about auditory attention?
Students are welcome to come and discuss their own project ideas with me. It is not
necessary to read any of the papers first, but you might find them interesting.
Specific project suggestions:
1. Auditory change ‘deafness’: How sensitive are we to changes to an auditory scene?
Example reference: Dalton, P., & Fraenkel, N. (2012). Gorillas we have missed:
Sustained inattentional deafness for dynamic events. Cognition, 124, 367-372.
2. Auditory enumeration: How well can we count different numbers of auditory
events? Can we ‘subitize’ small numbers of things, as in vision?
Example reference: Trick, L.M., & Pylyshyn, Z.W. (1994). Why are small and large
numbers enumerated differently? A limited-capacity preattentive stage in vision.
Psychological Review, 101, 80-102.
3. Auditory search: How do we search for a specific sound amid distractor sounds?
What helps us to do this well?
Example reference: Eramudugolla, R., et al. (2008). The role of spatial location in
auditory search. Hearing Research, 238, 139-146.
Adam Sanborn (F)
General:
How people categorize; understanding when human cognition is rational and when it
is not; people's intuitive understanding of the physical world.
Students wishing to carry out a project relating to any of the above areas are
encouraged to propose potential project ideas.
Specific:
1) Adults do not appear to understand that the water level in a tilted jar should be
horizontal, showing a bias to draw lines that are tilted towards the bottom of the glass,
like children do. Why is this? Do they really think the level of the water in a glass
looks like this despite a lot of real-world experience that says otherwise? Or are they
hedging their bets between different possibilities?
2) When people observe a series of economic outcomes, like a series of rewards from
a slot machine, the early and late outcomes often have more of an impact on decision
making than the middle outcomes. Is this just an effect of what can be remembered
memory? Or does it depend on what people's beliefs are about how the outcomes are
generated?
3) People’s appear to learn more from experience differs when the response is discrete
(like entering a number) compared to tasks where the response is continuous (like
pointing to the right spot on a computer screen). What drives this difference? Do
people just think getting feedback in discrete tasks is more informative?
4) When mock juries are presented with a case, they are more convinced by strong
evidence alone, like an eyewitness, than by strong and weaker evidence together, like
the same eyewitness plus a matching footprint. Are people averaging the information
together to come to an overall impression? Or do they find slightly inconsistent
evidence suspicious?
Nicole Tang (H)
General: Sleep; Pain; Anxiety; Health Psychology
Specific: The following research questions serve to provide an example. Students are
strongly encouraged to come up with their own research ideas for discussion.
(i) What are the unique characteristics of long and short sleepers?
(ii) Normal occurrences of pain in healthy individuals and their relationship with
mood, physical activity, and sleep.
(iii) Sleep disturbance and suicidality in young adults: An online survey.
Simon Townsend (H)
General: “Animal communication”
Specific: Information to follow
Kimberley Wade (F)
General
Aspects of episodic and autobiographical memory, autobiographical memory
distortions, digital technology and memory, eyewitness identification evidence
Specific research questions
1. Photography and memory:
Digital technology affects the way we remember (Henkel, 2013; Sparow, Liu, &
Wegner, 2011). How does taking photos of an event subsequently affect our memory
for that event?
2. Detecting manipulated images
People regularly encountered doctored images in their day to day lives. But how well
can people discriminate between real images and computer generated (CG) images,
and what might influence our ability to discriminate between authentic and
manipulated images?
There are ways to systematically measure the similarity between an authentic image
and a doctored image (e.g. measures of mutual information that determine how many,
and to what extent, pixels in an image have been altered). It would be interesting to
determine whether such measures of image-manipulation correlate well people’s
ability to detect a manipulation in an image.
People aren't very good at detecting image manipulations. Does this ability vary
depending on whether the manipulated image supports or contradicts an individual's
beliefs?
How well can people spot subtle changes across two images that are shown side by
side (e.g., in a change blindness type task)? Are there any changes in particular that
are more or less difficult for the human visual system to detect?
People only perform slightly better than chance at detecting image manipulations
when given an unlimited amount of time. What happens if we force people to make a
decision within a few seconds? Do people perform any better intuitively?
What can eye tracking tell us about successful and unsuccessful detection and location
of image manipulations?
What is the impact of attention on image manipulation detection? If we prime people
to focus their attention on certain areas of an image (manipulated area vs. nonmanipulated area) does this have an impact on their ability to detect manipulated
images?
How do different global filter types impact perceptions of image manipulation; can
people tell when these filters have been applied to an image? And what impact do
these filters have on how the image is perceived?
3. Constructing lineups for suspects with distinctive features
A comparison of eyewitness identification performance in lineups using still vs.
moving images. In England and Wales, police lineups are usually presented via
video, whereas the majority of lineups in the US use still images. To date, there has
been little research investigating how these two techniques affect eyewitness
identification performance.
Can covert retrieval practice improve facial recognition accuracy? Smith,
Roediger & Karpicke (2013) illustrated that covert retrieval (bringing information to
mind, or mentally rehearsing it) was equally as effective as overt retrieval (writing,
typing or speaking the material) for improving memory retention of word lists. Could
mentally rehearsing a to-be-remembered face also be beneficial for memory?
Derrick Watson (F)
General:
Visual attention, attentional capture, visual search, face processing, emotional
processing, effects of attention and emotion on judgement and decision making,
behavioural economics of visual performance, driving performance and influencing
driver behaviour.
Brief outline of project topics:
Emotional processing:
How do we reject or select emotionally charged stimuli?
How does the approach and withdrawal of stimuli influence our emotional perception
of them?
How do people process emotional images, and can framing influence their responses
to such stimuli? How do we process disgust and how do disgust reactions influence
our future actions?
Motion induced blindness: Are we less blind to emotionally charged stimuli?
Attentional processing:
What are the effects of eye blinks on attentional capture and visual processing?
What makes us think that something is alive?
Semantic based inhibition: How do we ignore information that is no longer relevant to
us and how does this interact with the semantics of the stimuli?
How do vision and sound interact to capture our attention?
How are illusory conjunctions processed and what is their influence on behaviour?
Behavioural Science/Judgement and decision making:
Value Psychophysics: How do people integrate financial and value information across
time and space?
The titration of inter-temporal choice alternatives: When do choices become
equivalent?
Do certain values capture our attention automatically?
How do we perceive the magnitude of multiple losses and gains?
What is the influence of local and global processing styles on judgement and decision
making?
Evaluating the effects of emergency lights on traffic safety and distraction.
Friederike Schlaghecken (F)
General:
Specific:
Individual differences in the Susceptibility to Subliminal Manipulation
To some extent, subjectively invisible (‘subliminal’) stimuli can affect (‘prime’) our
behavioural responses, even when we think that we have chosen those responses
freely and voluntarily [1]. It is well-known that such subliminal manipulation only
works if the primes are part of the participant’s task set, that is, if the participant has
the actual, conscious intention to responds to stimuli of this type [2-4].
It is completely unknown, however, whether there are any interindividual differences
in this susceptibility to subliminal manipulation. Does it show any relationship to a
person’s mood or motivation, to their risk-taking behaviour or any other personality
traits, to their perceptual sensitivity?
In order to answer such questions, large numbers of participants will have to be tested
– at least 100, ideally twice as many. Therefore, this is not a project that can be
handled by an individual or even by a pair! However, if several people are interested
in this project, then they could pool their resources in the following way:
a) Everybody picks one aspect of individual differences they want to test (for
instance, one person might be interested in risk-taking, another one in stress, a
third in cultural differences, a forth in authoritarianism…).
b) Everybody will test at least 25-30 participants (you must make sure that no
participant is tested twice!).
c) Each participant will be tested on the full range of tests:

a subliminal priming free-choice task (to measure people’s susceptibility
to subliminal manipulation), and

a subliminal prime-identification task (to measure people’s perceptual
sensitivity), and

the four (or more) questionnaires corresponding to the experimenters’ area
of interest (in the example above: one on risk-taking , one on stress, one on
cultural background, and one on authoritarianism).
d) Everybody will get to analyse the relevant data from all participants, that is, all
free-choice data, all prime-identification data, and all data from their own relevant
questionnaire, but not from the other questionnaires (i.e., the person interested in
risk taking will have 100 data sets of free-choice, prime-identification, and risktaking data, the person interested in stress will have 100 data sets of free-choice,
prime-identification, and stress data, and so on).
I have at present no particular preferences for any specific type of individual
difference. Feel free to contact me with your difference of choice!
(F.Schlaghecken@warwick.ac.uk)
References
[1] Klapp, S. T., & Hinkley, L. B. (2002). The negative compatibility effect:
Unconscious inhibition influences reaction time and response selection. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General, 131 , 255-269.
[2] Klapp, S. T., & Haas, B. W. (2005). Nonconscious influence of masked stimuli on
response selection is limited to concrete stimulus-response associations. Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 31, 193-209.
[3] O'Connor, P. A., & Neill, W. T. (2011). Does subliminal priming of free response
choices depend on task set or automatic response activation? Consciousness &
Cognition, 20, 280-287.
[4] Schlaghecken, F; Eimer, M (2004). Masked prime stimuli can bias "free" choices
between response alternatives. Psychonomkic Bulletin & Review, 11, 463-468.