MSc Projects

Supervisor(s)	Affilation	Project Title	Notes
Elisa Aguirre	UCL	Developing an online Alzheimer’s risk reduction intervention using the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW).
Details MSc research project proposal November 2015 Developing an online Alzheimer’s risk reduction intervention using the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW). The BCW essentially covers the full range of intervention functions such as education; persuasion and training that are likely to be effective in areas eliciting change in specific lifestyle target behaviours. These intervention functions can be further broken down into specific behaviour change techniques (BCTs) using the BCT taxonomy: BCTT (V1) (Michie et al., 2011), which provides an extensive list of evidence, based BCTs. Once the model defines the behaviour to be changed, the COM-B model (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation- Behaviour) within the BCW is used in order to identify what needs to be changed and therefore develop the intervention accordingly. The intervention will be tailored to individual needs as it currently is and therefore it will include or make use of different features and levels within the model. E.g. the intervention will be linked with individual levels of motivation and therefore will give specific feedback based on individual preferences, “the 6 prevention steps”. Preliminary field work will take place and therefore for this project information from two sources will be combined: 1) an analysis of the current dataset; 2) a survey for people who have completed the CFT in the last year and semi-structured interviews and focus groups with people who have completed the CFT and lifestyle questionnaire in the last year. We will systematically make use of the available evidence in relation to eHealth for dementia, the effect of nutrition in dementia risk, plus evidence in relation to the effects of awareness in relation to the link between healthy brain and body. This information will be combined with the use of the BCW framework to identify what theoretical domains need to be targeted to change risks and how these should be targeted (e.g., interactive features of the intervention, use of webseminars linked to behaviour change techniques). This model has been implemented successfully in other health promotion areas such as sexual health, obesity, mental health and general health in third world countries (Michie et al., 2014). A clear BCW manual, online training and guidelines are currently available for its implementation (Michie et al., 2011, 2014) and will be followed in order to redefine the intervention, CFT5. The intervention development based on the BCW will follow three stages: (1) Understanding the problem and user preferences through data analysis and qualitative surveys and interviews; (2) Translating research findings into intervention application features (eg. Webseminars); and, (3) Pre-testing the online features for further refinement (Figure 1). Figure 1 eHealth intervention development process by Kurtis et al., 2014 This project is based within the department of clinical, educational and health psychology and supervised by HCPC registered Health Psychologist. It would suit a hard working, independent student with a strong interest health psychology and behavior change. For more information, please contact: Dr Georgina Charlesworth and Dr Elisa Aguirre by email: g.charlesworth@ucl.ac.uk, e.aguirre@ucl.ac.uk
Joanna Atkinson-Hearn	UCL	Investigating British sign language skills in a deaf signer with visuospatial and face processing impairments
Details Investigating British sign language skills in a deaf signer with visuospatial and face processing impairments Prerequisites: Essential - fluent sign language skills Desirable (but not essential)- psychology or speech and language background Ethical approval already obtained This study involves collecting and analysing single case study data from a deaf participant with rare neurological damage involving the right temporal lobes, using tests of visuospatial ability, face recognition, and spatial and facial aspects of BSL (prepositions, classifiers, locatives etc). Right temporal lobe damage spares language function in spoken language but has subtle but serious consequences for the use of British Sign Language. The study aims to document the impact of right temporal damage for sign language, revealing hitherto little explored relations between the right hemisphere; spatial cognition; face processing - and language. This work is exciting because no one has documented a similar case in a deaf signer before, and the study of sign language allows phenomena to emerge that would be missed if research was only limited to spoken languages.
Bahador Bahrami	UCL	Collective decision making
Details Collective decision making Collective decision making describe the process in which a group of individuals interact and reach a decision, a process which take place in everyday life, as well as in crucial decision points in the lives of individuals and groups. We study this subjects by examining dyads (pairs of subjects) while making joint decisions regarding perceptual tasks. An emerging notion is the importance of metacognition, i.e. our ability to asses our own performance and communicate them, to this process. Key questions are how dynamic are metacognition abilities, and how they affect dyads performance. Moreover, can these properties be linked to neuronal structure or pattern of neuronal activity, which may indicate the neural basis of human cooperation? We are looking for a highly motivated student to take part in a project involving behavioural measurements of dyad decision making. Required Skills: Basic Statistics (SPSS, Excel), programming in Matlab (or other programming language) is not a must but having some background (or eagerness to learn) it is going to be very useful. Background in computer science and cognitive psychology/neuroscience is preferable. Required commitment: The project will require ~50 hours of data collection which will consist of ~30 sessions. In addition the task includes preparing the experiment (consent forms, experimental instructions, and running sheets), recruiting the participant pairs, running the experiments, backing up the data and participating in the analysis of the data. Educational value: The experiment offers an opportunity to engage in design, programming and implementation of a behavioural experiment in social neuroscience, as well as introduction to data analysis tools and methods. The student will become familiar with basic analysis of structural brain imaging data. Help for learning and using Matlab will be provided.
Christos Bechlivanidis	UCL	Causal knowledge and risk behaviour.
Details The aim of this project is to investigate the relationship between risk behaviour and type of causal information. Are people more willing to take risks when they know the causal mechanism behind a threat or when they know the frequency of the threat? References: Walsh, C. R., & Sloman, S. A. (2011). The meaning of cause and prevent: The role of causal mechanism. Mind & Language, 26(1), 21-52. Sloman, S. A., & Lagnado, D. (2015). Causality in thought. Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 223-247. Chicago
Christos Bechlivanidis	UCL	Causality and temporal order
Details The causal reordering effect (Bechlivanidis & Lagnado, 2013) is a recently discovered illusion in which events that are thought to be causally related are perceived to occur in the order suggested by their causal relationship even if that order conflicts with the objective temporal order. Imagine for example that your friend is holding a glass of water that suddenly slips through his hand and starts falling to the floor. While you are following the glass with your gaze and half a second before it reaches the ground, it shatters to pieces. Recent research indicates that you will in fact perceive the shattering after the glass collides with the floor. In other words, people seem to impose at the perceptual level the temporal priority principle of causal relationships: effects can never precede their causes. The following proposals aim to further elucidate the effect, the exact conditions in which it arises and the theoretical and practical implications. Any further ideas about projects examining the effect are very welcome. 1) Is the reordering effect present only in sequences where objects are in motion? This would suggest that the effect occurs only in noisy perceptual environments. Devise a paradigm in which there are strong causal assumptions about non-moving objects to test whether the effect depends on perceptual noise. 2) In the absence of stable causal knowledge, causal inference depends strongly on temporal order cues. Thus, if A occurs before B and we know that A and B are somehow correlated, temporal order is one of the major cues that is used to determine the causal direction, i.e. which is the cause and which is the effect. This well-known fact in combination with the causal reordering effect suggests a bidirectional relationship between causal and temporal order: we use temporal order to learn about causal relationships and we use causal knowledge to infer temporal order. Can we devise an experiment that will illustrate this bidirectionality? 3) To what extent does the presence of alternative causal explanations reduce the causal reordering effect? In other words, if the (objective) temporal order in which events take place can be explained by the behaviour of another event, would people report the correct temporal order? 4) What is the role of agency in the reordering effect? In the cases where I am causing the effect rather than passively observing it, will I perceive my action occurring before or after the effect? Compare the effect in purely observational vs. interventional contexts. See also (Rohde et al, 2014) 5) Is the effect present only in the visual domain? Would it work in the auditory domain too? i.e. do people reorder sounds according to their causal expectations? Suggested Readings Bechlivanidis, C., & Lagnado, D. A. (2013). Does the 'why' tell us the 'when'? Psychological science, 24(8), 1563-1572. doi: 10.1177/0956797613476046 Bechlivanidis, C., & Lagnado, D. A. (2016). Time reordered: Causal perception guides the interpretation of temporal order. Cognition, 146, 58-66. Marieke Rohde, Meike Scheller, Marc O. Ernst (2014) Effects can precede their cause in the sense of agency, Neuropsychologia, http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.10.011
Christos Bechlivanidis	UCL	What makes for a good explanation?
Details Do explanations need to be simple or complex, general or concrete? Do everyday explanations share the same qualities as scientific explanations? Is understanding a necessary goal of explanations? Some relevant reading: Lombrozo, T. (2016). Explanatory Preferences Shape Learning and Inference. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(10), 748–759. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.08.001 Grimm, S. R. (2010). The goal of explanation. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 41(4), 337–344. http://doi.org/10.1016/J.SHPSA.2010.10.006 Bechlivanidis, C., Lagnado, D. A., Zemla, J. C., & Sloman, S. (2017). Concreteness and abstraction in everyday explanation. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1–14. http://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-017-1299-3
Christos Bechlivanidis & Anne Schlottmann	UCL Experimental Psychology	Causal perception in complex environments or in unrealistic events
Details Christos Bechlivanidis & Anne Schlottmann, UCL Experimental Psychology c.bechlivanidis@ucl.ac.uk, a.schlottmann@ucl.ac.uk, We share an interest in in causal reasoning and perception and would be happy to co-supervise students in this area, either conducting online studies with adults or person-to-person studies with children. We have two current sets of projects: 1) PERCEPTUAL CAUSALITY IN COMPLEX ENVIRONMENTS: This line of work extends the approach pioneered in Michotte's famous studies of perceptual causality (Michotte, 1963). Michotte argued that sometimes, causality can be seen directly, and is essentially a Gestalt property of certain motion sequences. Michotte’s approach is so attractive because it explains how humans (including babies from birth) can be sensitive to simple forms of causality, when 2000 years of philosophy has not led to much agreement even on how to define the concept. Here we focus on the argument that perceptual causality could help us parse the event stream to determine the causal structure of our complex environment, without requiring much reasoning or problem-solving. This is an attractive claim, yet there are no data, as virtually all studies involve only two objects moving on similar paths in otherwise empty space. Here, we extend study to situations involving many moving objects on multiple trajectories, which is closer to the real world. In the simplest paradigm, we consider how causality judgments in such a complex world might differ (or not) from that in a two object environment. Another approach is to consider visual search for causality in such complex worlds, to explore whether perceptual causality confers advantages for attention. 2) CAUSALITY IN UNREALISTIC EVENTS: According to all relevant psychological theories, we should only consider a perceived sequence of events as causal if it (more or less) conforms to what is real or at least possible. Yet, this makes causal learning of genuinely new relations very difficult. It would also not seem to fit with our willingness to accept unrealistic forms of causality in movies or in magic shows, despite knowledge that this is not real-life causality. We have already done a series of studies showing that adults are very happy to treat various animated, unrealistic events (treated as non-causal in the Michotte literature) as causal on initial encounter – the events are re-evaluated and become non-causal only if there are repeated encounters that allow comparison to a more standard, realistic causal event, but prior to such comparison people entertain a quite wide range of unrealistic causal hypotheses. We would now like to extend the approach to look at people’s reaction to magic and to photo-realistic events “that should not be”. This project requires students who are either magicians, or who have very good video-editing skills, to produce the unrealistic events for testing. 3) BOTH PROJECTS COULD ALSO BE ADAPTED FOR WORK WITH CHILDREN.
Christos Bechlivanidis and Magda Osman	UCL/QMU	Fabricating coincidences
Details The aim of the project is to examine the low level cues that generate coincidences. The working hypothesis is that the coincidence detection shares the same mechanism with causal learning, the discovery of true causal relationships in the environment. To test this hypothesis we would like to 'fabricate' coincidences in the lab or online.
Daniel Bendor	UCL	Crowdsourcing 2.0: How can we better predict future outcomes through crowdsourcing
Details Supervisor: Daniel Bendor: d.bendor@ucl.ac.uk Departments: Experimental Psychology Topic: Crowdsourcing 2.0: How can we better predict future outcomes through crowdsourcing Crowdsourcing has become an increasing popular method for evaluating products and services (e.g. Yelp and Tripadvisor). One limitation with these methods is that a large number of votes are required to get an accurate representation of the population. The goal of this project is to develop a more efficient method of crowdsourcing, where the expertness of the evaluator is assessed, and used to weight the evaluation. In other words, experts will have more influence on the results than novices. We will run a series of experiments to evaluate whether objective measurements can be used to judge “expertness”, and whether reweighting evaluations based on this improves the accuracy of crowdsourcing. We are looking for a highly motivated student to take part in this project involving data collection and analysis. Required Skills: none. Programming in Matlab and PHP (for webpage design) is preferable.
Marinella Cappelletti	UCL	Learning in healthy ageing
Details Supervisors: Vincent Walsh and Marinella Cappelletti Topic: Learning in healthy ageing Idea summary: Working memory and inhibitory skills are known for being very important in several everyday activities and cognitive tasks, and they are also known for declining with age. The current project aims to study the effect of training on working memory and inhibitory skills, and the impact of any training-induced improvement on other cognitive abilities, such as attention, space especially number processing. We will be testing older healthy participants who will undergo intensive training based on an established paradigm. Half of the participants will also receive brain stimulation (transcranial direct current stimulation), whilst the other half of the participants will receive sham stimulation. We will test the predictions that (1) people receiving brain stimulation and training may improve more than those receiving just training, and that (2) transfer to untrained but related skills may reflect the amount of improvement of working memory and inhibitory skills. Required Skills: Basic Statistics (SPSS, Excel); excellent organisational skills, previous experience in testing participants and programming in Matlab would be preferable. Required commitment: The task includes preparing the experiment (consent forms, experimental instructions, and running sheets), helping with recruiting the participants, running the experiments, backing up the data and participating in the analysis of the data. Contact m.cappelletti@ucl.ac.uk
Wing-Yee Chow	UCL	Prediction in Native and Non-native Language Processing	eye-tracking and ERP experiments on real-time language processing
Details Prediction in Native and Non-native Language Processing Much recent work suggests that generating predictions about the future is a fundamental principle underlying the brain’s operations. Our ability to anticipate upcoming input allows us to process language quickly and reliable, and some of the challenges faced by different speaker groups (e.g., first and second language learners) may be attributable to failures to engage predictive mechanisms. This project aims to examine whether and how knowledge of one’s native language affects predictive computations during second language (L2) processing. Are some of the common mistakes made by L2 speakers attributable to a lack of prediction or perhaps to “faulty” predictive algorithms? To what extent do L2 speakers rely on their first language (L1) grammatical knowledge to compute predictions when they process their L2? Native (or near-native) proficiency in Spanish (or other Romance languages) is preferred but not required.
Katherine Clarke		Could the PRotect after depression intervention be implemented in IAPT Services? A thematic analysis of a focus group of pilot trial clinicians
Details It's estimated that one million people per year (and rising) are treated for their common mental health problems such as depression and anxiety in IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) services in England. After recovery patients are discharged and there is evidence that their symptoms can deteriorate particularly in the 6 months after discharge. Relapse following recovery from depression is common. For this reason we designed a novel intervention to add to depression treatment with the aim of preventing relapses. We have just completed a pilot trial (March 2018) of the PRotect intervention: a brief relapse prevention intervention for people who have recovered from depression in IAPT services. The intervention focusses on wellbeing and healthy habits, and was well received by participants and there is an indication it might help to prevent relapse. On completion of the trial we held a focus group to explore the experience of trial clinicians. The project offered for a Masters student would involve conducting a thematic analysis of the focus group transcript alongside myself, and co-authoring a publication. We will take a theory-driven approach to the analysis, using normalisation process theory to guide our assessment of whether the intervention could be implemented in IAPT services. The transcript is ready and methods reasonably developed. The project is not likely to be delayed, so may be suited to students who have had disruption to their original project plans.
Lee de-Wit	PALS	Psychology of Politics
Details I am broadly interested in the application of methods in psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science to the study of political decision making. My current research has a focus on the individual differences that might help to explain different attitudes towards immigration and inequality, and on the causes and consequences of political engagement. This year, I would be particularly interested in supervising projects on the following topics: 1) Testing whether psychological traits predict changes in voting behaviour in large political science databases. 2) Testing whether people with differing political affiliations use different vocabulary on twitter. 3) Testing whether people are biased to vote for politicians with facial characteristics that are perceived as more 'competent', using dynamic clips from election debates (this is a collaboration with the BBC). 4) Using more advanced machine learning and clustering methods to understand whether there are different 'types' of voters, and whether those types have different psychological characteristics. In addition to these topics, I'm happy (keen in fact) to discuss ideas from students that apply ideas and methods in modern cognitive science to political psychology.
Tessa Dekker	PALS	Visuomotor decision making in childhood
Details Over the course of a normal day, children have to make countless risky perceptual-motor decisions, from when to cross a busy road, to where to aim when kicking a ball in a guarded goal. Movement decisions involve a complex interplay between perceptual, motor and “cost” variables. The best decisions maximise the chance of success, and can be equated formally to maximising gain in a lottery. In previous studies we have found that children make overly risky decisions that harmed their visuomotor task performance (e.g., Dekker & Nardini, 2015, Developmental Science). To investigate when and how children learn to move their body in the safest and most efficient way possible, our group uses game-like computer tasks with touch screens, whole-body movement installations, virtual reality, and MRI. The measures are designed to emulate real-world problems we face when choosing safe courses of action during ‘movements under risk’, such as crossing a road or playing sports. We welcome motivated MSc students with excellent organisation and communication skills, and with some affinity for Maths (as we fit “ideal actor models” to performance measures to quantify movement efficiency). We will provide very thorough training and support in all aspects of the MSc project, including subject recruitment, data collection and all aspects of data analysis.
Joe Devlin		DLPFC contributions to decision making
Details There is considerable converging evidence that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a role in integrating both conscious and subconscious information when making decisions. For instance, it has been shown to be activated by brand (McClure et al 2004) and pricing information (Plassman et al 2007) when consumers evaluate whether or not to buy a product. Moreover, non-invasive stimulation of the region reduced emotional influences on jury decision making when assigning punishments with guilty verdicts (Bucholz et al 2016). This study will use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate the role of DLPFC during willingness-to-pay decision making in a simulated on-line shopping task. Brand information is expected to enhance willingness-to-pay over unbranded items (i.e. a brand advantage). The expectation is that TMS to DLPFC but not a control site, will reduce the advantage by interfering with the integration of the brand associations. Both behavioural and eye tracking data will be collected.
Joseph Devlin and Leun Otten	UCL	Neuro-focus groups for evaluating logo design
Details Designing a logo for a new company is more art than science, but it is based on psychological principles such as similarity and associations. The assumption is that a new logo needs to be consistent with the category of logos that it belongs to (e.g. family brands, luxury, etc). Feedback from focus groups is rarely accurate for logos because people often struggle to articulate what exactly they like/dislike about an image or how it fits or does not fit with their expectations. This project will explore the use of ERPs to provide empirical evidence of these factors from “neuro-focus groups.” The ERPs will be used to evaluate perceived category membership for logos in comparison to clear-cut canonical categories often used in mismatch negativity studies. The results will reveal whether ERPs can successfully supplement traditional focus groups when evaluating the suitability of new logos.
Joseph Devlin and Leun Otten	UCL	What constitutes sufficiently robust EEG hardware?
Details Traditional EEG systems use a montage of 32-256 electrodes arranged in a cap for data collection with the assumption being the more electrodes the better. This advantage is certainly present for spatial localisation and robustness but it comes at a cost – namely, the systems are more expensive and take a long time to set up per participant. Many ERP paradigms are fairly robust and do not require dipole localisation. In such cases, a high-density recording set-up may be unnecessary. This project will take a robust ERP paradigm such as an oddball paradigm and run participants on it using different EEG hardware systems, such as a typical high-density system, an Emotiv low-density system and a Muse 4-channel dry headband. The data will be compared to quantitatively evaluate robustness and sensitivity of the hardware when the sole goal is evaluating ERP waveforms (i.e. without topographic distribution or spatial localization). The results have important implications for interpreting results from different systems but also for practical data acquisition decisions.
Stephen Dewitt	UCL	Improving reasoning on Bayesian word problems
Details The study of reasoning on Bayesian word problems (such as the classic medical diagnosis and taxi cab problems) has a long history stretching back to at least Tversky and Kahneman (1983). The natural frequency / nested sets methods have proven to be the most effective in improving accuracy on classic problems, however recent work (Dewitt et al. under review) has suggested a way in which these approaches can be enhanced further, by combining them with a third approach. This has not been done before and would represent the first major improvement in accuracy in the field for 20 years.
Marwa ElZein	UCL	Contextual influence of punishment and reward on collective decision-making
Details Research on collective decision-making has mainly focused on whether they are better or worse than individual decisions. An important and less explored question is why individuals engage in collective decisions in the first place. The project here investigates one particular motive for individuals joining collectives: reducing the consequences of negative outcomes. In a behavioural task, participants will be given the possibility to voluntarily choose if they want to engage in individual or collective decisions in different contexts: decisions with reward (win), punishment (lose) or neutral. The experiment aims to provide a link between collective decisions and punishment aversion, by testing the prediction that participants will prefer to collaborate with others more often for decisions with aversive outcomes. The MSc student will code, run and analyse the behavioural experiment. Required skills: -Basic statistics -Programming using Matlab (or other programming softwares) is preferable
Harry Farmer	ICN	Processing body related stimuli among people with high experience of depersonalisation
Details I am a Post Doctoral Researcher at the ICN and would like to inform you about a project I am currently running along with Dr Antonia Hamilton and Dr Anna Ciaunica on the relationship between high frequency depersonalisation (DP) experiences and the sensorimotor processing of self and other's. DP is an altered form of consciousness which typically manifests as a disruption of bodily self-awareness. People experiencing DP report feelings of being “estranged”, cut-off from oneself and surroundings and often talk about “being in a bubble”, or being separated from the physical and social world by “an invisible barrier such as a pane of glass, a fog, or a veil” which when chronic can induce a persistent and highly disturbing sense of alienation known as depersonalisation disorder (DPD). Our project presented explores the relationship between the experience of DP and sensorimotor processing of self and other. We are currently investigating, in two studies, the differences in sensorimotor processing between healthy participants who have either a high or low trait occurrence of DP experiences. In the first experiment we investigate how trait DP affects the integration of visual and tactile sensory signal Visual Remapping of Touch (VRT) paradigm. In the second we will investigate how high trait DP affects sensorimotor mirroring using a facial mimicry paradigm. As well as having an interesting clinical aspect in helping to understand the at present poorly understood phenomena of DP the project will give you a chance to learn about how to prepare stimuli for individual participants, how to conduct psychophysiological experiments using tactile stimulation and EMG recording and how to analyse and present that data. If you are interested in taking this project on for your MSc dissertation please contact me at h.farmer@ucl.a.uk and we can meet and discuss the work.
Leutner, Franziska	UCL	Developing an online self-help intervention using EMDR
Details EMDR protocols are standardised and an increasing amount of research studies suggest that EMDR is effective in treating anxiety, pain, and fear. This renders the possibility to develop an automated EMDR protocol, in the form of an online intervention, which patients can use for self help. This project involves recruiting participants and evaluating the effectiveness and/or user experience of an online intervention. It would be of interest for anyone looking to learn more about eHealth, behavioural health tech, and the use of psychotherapy methods to bring about behavioural change. Project aim is to design an effective online intervention using evidence based methodologies from psychotherapy. This project contributes to the goal by (i) generating initial data on how users interact with online applications in the context, and (ii) developing a framework for testing and evaluating the effectiveness and user friendliness of such applications. Valiente-Gómez A, Moreno-Alcázar A, Treen D, Cedrón C, Colom F, Pérez V and Amann BL (2017) EMDR beyond PTSD: A Systematic Literature Review. Front. Psychol. 8:1668. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01668 Ebert, D. D., Zarski, A. C., Christensen, H., Stikkelbroek, Y., Cuijpers, P., Berking, M., & Riper, H. (2015). Internet and computer-based cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety and depression in youth: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled outcome trials. PLoS ONE, 10(3), 1–15. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0119895 De Jongh, A., Ten Broeke, E., & Renssen, M. . (1999). Treatment of Specific Phobias with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 13(1–2), 69–85. http://doi.org/10.1016/S0887-6185(98)00040-1 Markus, W., & Hornsveld, H. (2017). EMDR Interventions in Addiction. Journal of EMDR Practice and Research, 11(1), 3–29. http://doi.org/10.1891/1933-3196.11.1.3
Laura Gibbon & Peter Fonagy	UCL	Access to, and experience of, care for students with mental health problems
Details Please see attached Word document for details
John Greenwood	UCL Experimental Psychology	Variations in visual perception	See our lab website for more: http://eccentricvision.com
Details Variations in visual perception John Greenwood Email: john.greenwood@ucl.ac.uk Lab website: http://eccentricvision.com Our lab examines visual perception, using the techniques of visual psychophysics in order to understand the way that we see the world. I have suggested two projects, but feel free to contact me if you have other interests or ideas. Both projects below will involve a series of behavioural experiments using psychophysical techniques. You will acquire skills in experiment design, programming (in MATLAB), psychophysical testing, and data analysis. Programming experience is a plus but not required in advance. Project 1: Visual crowding in dyslexia In our visual field, objects are easy to see when we look directly at them and difficult to see in peripheral vision. This is not simply to do with visual resolution – even when a target object is large enough to be seen in isolation, the placement of other objects nearby can make the target become difficult to recognise. This process, known as crowding, is a fundamental bottleneck for visual perception. Crowding has also been argued to be elevated in the central vision of people with dyslexia. These elevations have been found via letter-identification tasks, though evidence with other tasks (e.g. the orientation of line elements) is mixed. We suspect that dyslexic crowding is specific to letters and that other visual domains are unaffected – you could test this by directly comparing the crowding of letter stimuli with those for simpler visual tasks (like line orientation). The project will also touch on broader issues regarding whether crowding is a singular process or a family of independent feature-level processes. Relevant publications: -Whitney, D, & Levi, DM. (2011). Visual crowding: A fundamental limit on conscious perception and object recognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(4), 160-168. -Kalpadakis-Smith, A.V., Goffaux, V., & Greenwood, J.A. (2018). Crowding for faces is determined by visual (not holistic) similarity: Evidence from judgements of eye position. Scientific Reports, 8 (12556), 1-14. -Greenwood, JA, Bex, PJ, & Dakin, SC (2010). Crowding changes appearance. Current Biology, 20(6), 496-501. Project 2: The perception of position in faces vs. simpler objects We are experts at face recognition. Our visual system is similarly specialised, with a network of face-selective brain regions. How does this specialisation relate to earlier levels of visual processing? We will examine this via judgements of eye position within faces. Prior work has shown that shifts in eye position are easier to detect along the horizontal dimension than the vertical. This pattern differs to that found in simpler objects – in peripheral vision for instance, shifts in the position of dot elements are easier to detect in the radial dimension (along a circle with equal distance from fixation) than along the tangential dimension (towards/away from fixation). Your project could examine this discrepancy directly by comparing position judgements for eyes within faces and dot elements in peripheral vision. We aim to determine the conditions that lead to the ‘special’ pattern of selectivity observed for faces, and to understand both the development of these specialisations in the visual system and their potential neural basis. Relevant publications: -Goffaux, V., & Rossion, B. (2007). Face inversion disproportionately impairs the perception of vertical but not horizontal relations between features. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 33 (4), 995-1002. -Greenwood, J.A., Szinte, M., Sayim, B., & Cavanagh, P. (2017). Variations in crowding, saccadic precision, and spatial localization reveal the shared topology of spatial vision. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114 (17), E3573-E3582.
Ana Guinote	UCL	Does Power Increase Motivation? An Examination of Effort
Details Social power facilitates action and the pursuit of goals throughout all stages of goal pursuit (e.g., Guinote, 2017). At the same time, animal studies suggest that power increases dopamine levels in the midbrain, a neurotransmitter linked to motivation (e.g., Morgan et al., 2002). In this project we investigate whether power affects effort deployed during goal pursuit. We will follow a computational approach, and use a paradigm to measure effort, whereby participants decide to accept or reject offers in which different levels of reward are available for different levels of physical effort (grip force, see Husain & Roiser, 2018). This project is in collaboration with Prof Jon Roiser. Guinote, A. (2017). How power affects people: Activating, wanting, and goal seeking. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 353-381. Husain, M., & Roiser, J. P. (2018). Neuroscience of apathy and anhedonia: a transdiagnostic approach. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 1. Morgan, D., Grant, K. et al., (2002). Social dominance in monkeys: dopamine D2 receptors and cocaine self-administration. Nature Neuroscience, 2, 169-174.
Ana Guinote	UCL	Dopamine and Empowerment in Parkinson’s Disease
Details Social power facilitates action and goal orientation (Guinote, 2017; Keltner, Gruenfeld, Anderson, 2003). Powerful individuals more readily take action in a variety of everyday tasks and more readily initiate and strive for active goals. It has been proposed that these effects of power derive from an activation of the Behavioural Approach System (BAS, see Keltner et al., 2003). This system functions as a positive feedback device that is responsive to the expectation of rewards, such as food or sex. BAS activity depends on dopaminergic pathways in the midbrain (Keltner et al., 2003). In this project we test the hypothesis that dopamine is crucial for power’s effect by examining the effects of empowerment on patients with Parkinson’s Disease. This is a collaborative project with Prof Marjan Jahanshahi, Institute of Neurology. Guinote, A. (2017). How power affects people: Activating, wanting, and goal seeking. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 353-381. Morgan, D., Grant, K. et al., (2002). Social dominance in monkeys: dopamine D2 receptors and cocaine self-administration. Nature Neuroscience, 2, 169-174. Obeso I, Wilkinson L, Casabona E, Bringas ML, Alvarez M, Alvarez L, Pavón N, Rodríguez-Oroz MC, Macías R, Obeso JA, Jahanshahi M. Deficits in inhibitory control and conflict resolution on cognitive and motor tasks in Parkinson's disease. Exp Brain Res. 2011 Jul;212(3):371-84.
Ana Guinote	UCL	Effects of Casual Touch on Prosocial Behavior
Details Casual touch signals communion sharing. When waitresses briefly touch clients, clients leave larger tips (Crusco & Wetzel, 1984). Touched recipients are more likely to agree to signing a petition (Willis & Hamm, 1980). We test the hypothesis that touch can have downstream effects, increasing the readiness for prosocial behaviour towards touch-unrelated individuals. We have examined charity donations, tipping in restaurants and spontaneous help toward touch-unrelated parties. We are currently examining underlying mechanisms. Galance, A., & Spence, C. (2010). The science of interpersonal touch: An overview. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 34, 246–259. Guéguen, N., & Fisher-Lokou, J. (2003). Tactile contact and spontaneous help: an evaluation in a natural setting. Journal of Social Psychology, 143, 785–787. Seger, C.R., Smith, E. R., Percy, E. J., & Conrey, F., R. (2014), Reach Out and Reduce Prejudice: The Impact of Interpersonal Touch on Intergroup Liking. Basic & Applied Social Psychology, 36, 51-58. doi: 10.1080/01973533.2013.856786
Ana Guinote	UCL	Effects of Social Power on Face Perception
Details Lack of social power has been shown to enhance visual perceptual discrimination. As such powerless individuals are more vigilant and attentive to social information in others due to the challenges and uncertainty they experience. Yet, it still remains to be explored whether similar effects occur in response to facial images of the self. The proposed project builds upon a paradigm by Epley & Whitchurch (2008) by investigating whether gaining or loosing social power influences participants’ face recognition and social judgements. This project is in collaboration with Dr Eva Krumhuber Epley, N., & Whitchurch, E. (2008). Mirror, mirror on the wall: Enhancement in self- recognition. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 1159-1170. Welling, L.L.M., Moreau, B.J.P., Bird, B.M., Hansen, S., & Caree, J.M. (2016). Exogeneous testosterone increases men’s perceptions of their own physical dominance. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 64, 136-142.
Ana Guinote & Eva Krumhuber	EP	Effects of social power on other-face perception
Details Lack of social power has been shown to enhance visual perceptual discrimination. As such powerless individuals are more vigilant and attentive to social information in others due to the challenges and uncertainty they experience. Yet, it still remains to be explored whether similar effects occur in response to facial images of other people. The proposed project builds upon a paradigm by Wang, Guinote, and Krumhuber (2018) by investigating whether gaining or loosing social power influences participants’ recognition and social judgements of other people’s faces. This project is in collaboration with Dr Eva Krumhuber. Placement: 1 student Requirements: Ability to recruit 35 male White/Caucasians (18-40 years) Literature: Wang, X., Guinote, A., & Krumhuber, E. (2018). Dominance biases in the perception and memory for the faces of power holders, with consequences for social inferences. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 78, 23-33. Galinsky, A. D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Magee, J. C. (2003). From power to action. Journal of personality and social psychology, 85(3), 453. Tiedens, L. Z., & Fragale, A. R. (2003). Power moves: complementarity in dominant and submissive nonverbal behavior. Journal of personality and social psychology, 84(3), 558. Watkins, C. D., Fraccaro, P. J., Smith, F. G., Vukovic, J., Feinberg, D. R., DeBruine, L. M., & Jones, B. C. (2010). Taller men are less sensitive to cues of dominance in other men. Behavioral Ecology, 21(5), 943-947. Yap, A. J., Mason, M. F., & Ames, D. R. (2013). The powerful size others down: The link between power and estimates of others' size. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(3), 591-594.
Marc Guitart	UCL	Contextual Novelty and Decision Making
Details I am a postdoctoral fellow at the ICN and the FIL working with Emrah Duzel and Ray Dolan. I offer a project that would involve behavioural test and modelling. The student would be looking at how contextual novelty before engaging in a decision task affects exploration. Data would be analysed with simple general lineal model and also with reinforcement learning modelling approaches.
Antonia Hamilton	UCL	Imitation/action understanding and social neuroscience
Details MSc projects in the Hamilton lab for social cognition I am happy to supervise projects within the domains of imitation / action understanding and social neuroscience. This includes: Control of mimicry - Mimicry occurs when people spontaneously copy each other. Several possible projects are available to investigate which social cues change mimicry, including facial features, facial expression and unconscious priming. Methods will build on Wang & Hamilton 2013 (http://www.antoniahamilton.com/WangHamilton_PlosOne_2013.pdf) Motivation & theory of mind - what motivates people to think about others & consider their viewpoint? Projects are available which measure both motivation and mentalising abilities, building on Dubey, Ropar & Hamilton (2015) http://www.antoniahamilton.com/Dubey_MolAut_2015.pdf [note that we will not be testing participants with autism in MSc projects] What next? If you are interested in any of these projects, please visit www.antoniahamilton.com to see recent work from my lab. Then please email a.hamilton@ucl.ac.uk with a short (1 paragraph) outline of what you would like to study in your project.
Lasana Harris	UCL	Flexible social cognition
Details People have the ability to infer the mental states of other people and objects, as well as to fail to do so. This project examines this cognitive processes, looking at person, animal and object perception, emotional responses, and decision-making. Students interested in the general topic should contact the supervisor to discuss project specifics in any of these domains.
Adam Harris	UCL	Risk Communication in surgery and cumulative probability judgments
Details 2-3 projects available, both with the potential for clear applied implications. Please see the word document for further information
Nigel Harvey	UCL	Ethical decision making using trolley problems and their variants
Details For more information see this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY&feature=youtu.be Can be run via Qualtrics I should be able to discuss this project via email until mid-November and after mid-January. At present (2 October), I have still have space for five students. I accept students on a first come first served basis.
Chandni Hindocha, Dr. Tom Freeman and Prof. Val Curran	UCL	Developing CRESIDA: The Cannabis Research Image Database – a novel, validated stimulus set for cannabis research
Details Changes in the regulation of cannabis for recreational as well as medical use are currently continuing apace in many parts of the world and alongside it comes changes in the patterns of cannabis use and susceptibility to addiction. Cannabis use practices also vary across the world and there are challenges associated with working cross-culturally to ensure reliability. One of the obstacles for the design of rigorous, reproducible studies in cannabis research is the lack of suitable and validated image databases. Such a database would allow for studies to be better compared and aggregated by removing inter-lab variation. Another obstacle to cannabis research and to the creation of standardised cannabis research material, is that access to cannabis products for research purposes is restricted in many international jurisdictions and requires time-consuming and difficult-to approve home office licenses. This database will provide international researchers with ready access to already developed, high-quality pictures of cannabis and matched neutral stimuli. We foresee such a database being utilized in neuroimaging and behavioural research relevant to cannabis e.g. cue reactivity, attentional bias and cue-induced craving. This project aims to validate an international picture set related to cannabis consumption (both routes and different types) and matched control images in cannabis users across distinct countries, including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia and the US. We aim to investigate the association between ratings of cannabis and neutral pictures and levels of drug use and problem cannabis use. We also aim to investigate differences between countries with varying cultures, cannabis-related jurisdictions and drug use practises. This project would suit one enthusiastic student who is interested in exploring all aspects of the research process from design to publishing. You will be working within an international team of researchers and alongside the principles of open science. The study will be designed in Qualtrics. The project will be supervised by Chandni Hindocha and Dr Tom Freeman. Please contact Chandni Hindocha (c.hindocha@ucl.ac.uk) to express your interest in this project.
Peter Howell	UCL	Altered auditory feedback, tDCS and stuttering projects
Details What does you voice sound different when you speak as opposed to when you hear a recording of it? You will be aware that your voice sounds higher in frequency in a recording than as you speak. This is because of bone-conducted sound (bcs) which emphasizes the low frequency components of the voice. Classic estimates suggest that the level of bcs is about the same as speech going directly to the ear. This mixed sound has the low frequency emphasis, but does bcs accurately represent other components of spoken voice (e.g. the formants)? Some evidence suggest that bcs has extra resonances and damps out components present in the air-conducted sound (acs). This project dissociates bcs from acs at the brainstem level (FFR response to speech). FFRs are collected during vocalization under normal listening conditions (bcs and acs in their normal relationship) and when the air-conducted component is altered (acs selectively changed). This allows the two components to be distinguished in the FFR signal. Some knowledge of signal processing would be advantageous. The above project is jointly supervised with Dr Tuomainen. The following three are projects with Naheem Bashir. Using tDCS brain stimulation to enhance and improve speech processes Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive method which involves applying a weak electrical current to brain regions, to increase or decrease activity in targeted brain regions, thus either improving or worsening the functions associated with that particular brain region. TDCS has been used to improve cognitive functions such as memory and general learning, as well as enhance positive treatment outcomes of disorders such as depression and aphasia. In our studies, we are attempting to show that tDCS can be used to improve speech control in healthy individuals. These findings will then be taken forward to enhance the positive effects of treatment for people with the speech disorder of stuttering. For example, using tDCS alongside an already effective treatment may increase positive treatment effects by up to 50%, as tDCS has been shown to do in stroke rehabilitation research. You will receive full training with the tDCS equipment, and be fully involved in study design, data collection and analysis. Examining the effect of social evaluation and observation on sensorimotor integration, motor control and speech motor control using fNIRS Research suggests that observation or perceived judgements by another person can affect one’s performance during a task. We want to explore this principle using behavioural and neuroimaging studies with functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The advantage of fNIRS, as opposed to more common methods such as fMRI, is tasks can be conducted in a more naturalistic setting allowing for examination of the neural substrates of social situations. In one study, participants will be observed by another person whilst they complete sensorimotor integration, motor and speech tasks. In the second study, alongside sensorimotor integration, motor and speech tasks, participants will view facial expressions that correspond to neutral, negative or positive evaluation of their performance. With these studies, we can therefore assess the influence of social variables on motor performance and assess associated neural correlates. This research is particularly relevant to disorders such as stuttering, a speech motor disorder, where the level of speech difficulty experienced varies across contexts and social situations. You will receive full training with the fNIRS equipment, and be fully involved in study design, data collection and analysis. Using fNIRS to explore speech processes, sensorimotor integration and contextual variability of speech fluency in people who stutter (PWS) Stuttering is a speech disorder which affects around 70 million around the world, and involves disruption in the rhythm, timing and flow of speech. As a result of the physical communication impairment, quality of life is affected in PWS across social, educational and employment contexts. The disorder is commonly thought to be a motor disorder, and more recently a sensorimotor integration issue. Neuroimaging research into stuttering typically involves unrealistic environments due to the use of restrictive and limited imaging methods such as fMRI. With the use of fNIRS, we can assess stuttering brain activity in more realistic environments as well as explore social influences on stuttering to try and understand its social and contextual variability. Our fNIRS studies will involve assessing brain activity of PWS during conversation with a person who does not stutter; during speech and sensorimotor integration tasks; and fluency enhancing and worsening conditions. Our studies will allow us to gain an insight into the process of dysfunction in stuttered speech in social and non social situations; the breakdown of sensorimotor integration processes; and the neural correlates of fluent speech produced by PWS, and how this breaks down to produce stuttered speech. You will receive full training with the fNIRS equipment, and be fully involved in study design, data collection and analysis. Three more projects on altered auditory feedback in PWS Project 1: This experiment tests how quickly feedback affects speech control and how quickly the effects dissipate when altered feedback is switched off in PWS. . Two tasks are employed: One examines how fluency is affected by the alteration in PWS with fluent speakers as controls; and the other examines speech control in general under the alteration to see whether both groups of speakers are affected and, if so, whether they are affected in the same or different ways. In the task to study fluency, altered feedback is delivered on stutters that the PWS (and possibly controls) produce and time to recover fluency is compared between these and stutters that receive no alteration. In the task to study general speech control, speakers produce four syllables and one of them receives an alteration. Similar comparisons are made between altered and non-altered syllables as was done when fluency control was examined. In both tasks, the time course that the alteration has on speech control in general (PWS and fluent controls) and fluency control in particular (PWS) are established. Project 2: The hypothesis is that adaptation occurs in PWS who reduce voice level as this leads to less feedback and thereby decreases the fluency-enhancing effect of the alterations (Howell & Archer, 1984). There are two parts to this study First, the hypothesis predicts that PWS who adapt will tend to reduce their voice level more than those who do not adapt. Voice level will be measured to test this. The second study tests whether an automatic gain control (AGC) reinstates fluency in PWS who adapt to altered feedback. The first part should show that speakers who adapt to the effects of altered feedback do so by reducing voice level that also decreases feedback level. This would be prevented by using an AGC. The AGC adjusts voice intensity to a preset level that neutralizes reductions in speech level leading to reductions in level of the altered sound. The boost to the intensity of the altered feedback delivered by the AGC when voice level drops allows the PWS who would have adapted to maintain the fluency-enhancing effects. Project 3: General background to motor learning project and altered feedback The study ascertains what affects learning and retention rates of induced fluency; comparison will be with immediate feedback where little retention of induced fluency is expected. In this project, PWS will be tested at different points over 20 sessions and learning rates will be determined. The experiments will continue for another 10 sessions without alteration in one group (and with alteration in another group) to determine transfer and its retention over time. In these studies, altered feedback delivered on stutters is considered to reinforce fluent behavior on these episodes s indicated next. There are two parts to this project. The first tests whether targeting alterations on difficult material externally (i.e. by the experimenter) is more effective at inducing fluency than targeting them at random and possibly as effective as having the alterations on continuously. The second part tests whether targeting alterations on material that is spoken rapidly will be more effective at inducing fluency than targeting alterations at random and possibly on speech that varies in difficulty. The combined effect of difficulty and rate (current study) will also be determined. It is expected that if material is spoken rapidly and fast, it would be more difficult than speech that is spoken in only one of these ways. One project on categorical perception Project: Categorical perception (CP) of Mandarin tones by English and Mandarin speakers Hypothesis : Mandarin speakers will show CP performance, but the English speakers will show less CP effects. Categorical perception (CP) refers to phenomena observed in the identification and discrimination mainly (but not exclusively) of speech sounds. This project uses continua that vary between a rising to a falling tone. They are identified as rise, flat and fall. We will examine identification and discrimination of these sounds in speakers who use them conventionally in their language (Mandarin-speaking students) and those who do not (English-speaking students). A further rtest will be whether speakers transfer the tones they have learned to novel syllables. Requirements: Matlab programming.
Peter Howell	UCL	Judgments by teachers and therapists when deciding whether a child needs speech therapy
Details Judgments by teachers and therapists when deciding whether a child needs speech therapy Maarten Speekenbrink looked at models concerning how decisions were made in groups in his PhD thesis (see chapter 5 in http://dare.uva.nl/document/2/35501). We want to take this forward and see how it applies in a realistic situation involving how teachers and speech-language therapists (SLTs) make decisions about referral of children for treatment of speech difficulties. Whilst both teachers and SLTs both take speech-based measures into account when making their decisions, teachers take factors associated with educational attainment into account, whereas SLTs take factors associated with ongoing speech difficulty into account. As preparation, we need to estimate the relative weighting placed on speech cues versus other cues and the weightings of the cues employed by individual groups. The second experiment in chapter 5 (p.90) of MS’s PhD looks at a partly shared, partly distributed (e.g., hybrid) environment, so assessment of cases where teachers and SLTs both use the same, but also unique information, is possible. Another possibility is that if both use different information, but still make judgements about the same children, a situation more like the distributed task in Experiment 1 occurs. Both of these are potential models of the decision processes behind what the 2 groups do. We will examine such models and establish the impact making decisions in these various ways affects judgment performance. This should provide information to establish whether current ways of making decisions about a child are made in a satisfactory way and suggest ways of improving such mutual decisions. This is a joint proposal by Peter Howell and Maarten Speekenbrink (the main day to day supervision of the project will be by Howell).
Peter Howell	UCL	Screening children for SLCN in schools
Details Interventions for SLCN in reception classes: We are working with various schools identifying any of the children starting school who have various types of expressive speech difficulty. We screen all the children (many of whom speak English as an Additional Language, EAL). We are able to identify which children have serious difficulties that may call for intervention by a Speech and Language therapist. Some of the children who speak English only (EO) or EAL have word-finding difficulties (WFD) and we offer children who speak English Only (CwEO) or English as an Additional Language (CwEAL) interventions for this issue. The interventions provide: 1) phonological training (non-word repetition) for all children; and 2) training to avoid disruption due to conflicting meanings similar sound patterns can have between the languages a CwEAL may speak. The interventions are intended to improve primary school children’s language (including fluency and word-finding), literacy and phonological skills. The non-word training materials employ sound patterns that occur in English that are challenging for children (the type of material that is most challenging depends on the languages that a child speaks). English words that contain sound patterns with the same underlying form as the non-word material are then used to determine whether the training transfers to real words. CwEAL are trained next with speech sounds that activate the same or different meanings in the two languages that they speak. They are required to produce the English form when meanings differ across their languages. CwEO are trained to link each speech sound with its meaning. Language, literacy and phonological skills are being assessed before and after the intervention to establish improvements in performance. Speech fluency and word-finding tests are also assessed. The intervention is delivered by researchers at present but it is designed to be efficient and easy for teachers to use (project 4 will work on computer programmes for administration of tests and for scoring). It is unlikely that you will have police checks that would allow you to work in schools. But you can get involved by helping on the studies. Particular languages we are currently working with in schools are Polish and Urdu/Hindi (you may be interested if you speak one of these languages) and a similar test for Spanish is to be designed in the next project. Spanish Phonological non-word training material and semantic materials that have the same or different meanings across languages are required for training children who use Spanish as their first language to speak English and vice versa. To design the phonological material, the first task (done) is to identify those phonological features that are shared across English and Spanish (neither group of children need to acquire these). Phonological features specific to each language (outside the preceding set) then specify what children using Spanish but needing to use English (or vice versa) need to learn. This is one task that need to be conducted. The second task is to identify words with very similar sound forms that have one (termed true friends, TF) or two (termed false friends, FF) meanings across the two languages. TF help second language learning whereas false friends can cause interference. The training procedure mixes up TF and FF training to avoid problems caused by FF. An initial selection of TF and FF is prepared by a computational linguist who is part of the team. Some properties are compared for you (e.g. word frequency) but all materials need checking by someone who is fluent in both languages. Once the selection has been made, picture stimuli need to be generated to conduct the test. A pilot test (on a small number of adults) should be conducted so that the study can be written up as a research report.
Peter Howell	UCL	tDCS projects in fluent speakers and speaker who stutter
Details We have several projects available over the coming year, with the general theme being general motor and speech motor control. Using tDCS brain stimulation to enhance and improve speech processes Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive method which involves applying a weak electrical current to brain regions, to increase or decrease activity in targeted brain regions, thus either improving or worsening the functions associated with that particular brain region. TDCS has been used to improve cognitive functions such as memory and general learning, as well as enhance positive treatment outcomes of disorders such as depression and aphasia. In our studies, we are attempting to prove that tDCS can be used to improve speech in healthy individuals. These findings will then be taken forward to enhance the positive effects of treatment for people with the speech disorder of stuttering. For example, using tDCS alongside an already effective treatment may increase positive treatment effects by up to 50%, as tDCS has been shown to do in stroke rehabilitation research. You will receive full training with the tDCS equipment, and be fully involved in study design, data collection and analysis. Examining the effect of social evaluation and observation on sensorimotor integration, motor control and speech motor control using fNIRS Research suggests that observation or perceived judgements by another person can affect one’s performance during a task. We want to explore this principle using behavioural and neuroimaging studies with functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The advantage of fNIRS, as opposed to more common methods such as fMRI, is tasks can be conducted in a more naturalistic setting allowing for examination of the neural substrates of social situations. In one study, participants will be observed by another person whilst they complete sensorimotor integration, motor and speech tasks. In the second study, alongside sensorimotor integration, motor and speech tasks, participants will view facial expressions that correspond to neutral, negative or positive evaluation of their performance. With these studies, we can therefore assess the influence of social variables on motor performance and assess associated neural correlates. This research is particularly relevant to disorders such as stuttering, a speech motor disorder, where the level of speech difficulty experienced varies across contexts and social situations. You will receive full training with the fNIRS equipment, and be fully involved in study design, data collection and analysis. Using fNIRS to explore speech processes, sensorimotor integration and contextual variability of speech fluency in people who stutter (PWS) Stuttering is a speech disorder which affects around 70 million around the world, and involves disruption in the rhythm, timing and flow of speech. As a result of the physical communication impairment, quality of life is hugely affected in PWS across social, educational and employment contexts. The disorder is commonly thought to be a motor disorder, and more recently a sensorimotor integration issue. Neuroimaging research into stuttering typically involves unrealistic environments due to the use of restrictive and limited imaging methods such as fMRI. With the use of fNIRS, we can assess stuttering brain activity in more realistic environments as well as explore social influences on stuttering to try and understand it’s social and contextual variability. Our fNIRS studies will involve assessing brain activity of PWS during conversation with a person who does not stutter; during speech and sensorimotor integration tasks; and fluency enhancing and worsening conditions. Our studies will allow us to gain an insight into the process of dysfunction in stuttered speech in social and non social situations; the breakdown of sensorimotor integration processes; and the neural correlates of fluent speech produced by PWS, and how this breaks down to produce stuttered speech. You will receive full training with the fNIRS equipment, and be fully involved in study design, data collection and analysis.
Slava Karolis	UCL	The study of estimation using constructive paradigm
Details Project title: The study of estimation using constructive paradigm. Supervised: Slava Karolis and Brian Butterworth. The real-world tasks bear a structural resemblance to magnitude estimation, in that people have to evaluate or classify a sequence of stimuli. Very often this resemblance results in a similarity of model functions (e.g. the response function for numerical estimation has analogous to utility function in economics logarithmic form). We would like to investigate the decision making process and the effect of non-numerical factors in numerical estimation tasks. We are interested if the performance involving an active re-construction of numerical sets will dissociate from observations reported for forced-choice tasks. We designed a novel paradigm and made its basic implementation in Matlab. The design of experiment(s) will be finalised after consultation with an interested person. The project may be attractive for those who are interested in data modelling. Some knowledge of Matlab would be helpful.
Katja Kornysheva	Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience	Representation of timing in pseudo-speech sequences
Details Title: Representation of timing in pseudo-speech sequences Study background: Recent studies have revealed that skilled motor sequences such as precisely timed sequences of finger presses are encoded in a modular fashion - with temporal and spatial features of sequences represented separately from each other to enable flexible motor control (Kornysheva et al. 2013, Kornysheva & Diedrichsen 2014, Diedrichsen and Kornysheva 2015). While this effect has been replicated in finger movement sequences, it is unclear in how far speech sequences – ubiquitous in everyday life – follow the same encoding pattern. This project will be the first to study the presence of modular representations pseudo-speech sequences in a behavioural training paradigm. Potential significance: Results will open up opportunities for future neuroimaging studies on speech like sequence acquisition, retrieval and control and may become relevant for the understanding and treatment of speech disorders like dyspraxia and stuttering. Your contribution: You will be involved in running the bevioural pilots and study, adjusting the experimental setup (cogent code etc.) and co-analysing the behavioural data. Programming skills in Matlab and very good organisational skills are, and/or knowledge of speech/auditory analysis software (PRAAT or similar) or relevant Matlab toolboxes are highly desired, as well as a strong interest in procedural memory encoding and motor/speech control. References: Kornysheva K, Sierk A, Diedrichsen J (2013) Interaction of temporal and ordinal representations in movement sequences. Journal of Neurophysiology 109(5):1416-1424. Kornysheva K & Diedrichsen J (2014). Human premotor areas parse sequences into their spatial and temporal features. eLife doi: 10.7554/eLife.030433. Diedrichsen J & Kornysheva K (2015). Motor skill learning between selection and execution. Trends in Cognitive Science 19(4):227-233.
Eva Krumhuber	UCL	Measuring user experiences of chatbots
Details The project aims to test chatbot user experiences of people with and without disabilities in order to gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which people engage with current chatbot technology. The student will contribute to the experimental evaluation of a range of state-of-the-art chatbots. The measures used to evaluate the data from this experimentation will assess each chatbot in terms of accessibility, usability, equality and fairness. Placement: 1 student
Eva Krumhuber & Ana Guinote	EP	Effects of social power on self-face perception
Details Lack of social power has been shown to enhance visual perceptual discrimination. As such powerless individuals are more vigilant and attentive to social information in others due to the challenges and uncertainty they experience. Yet, it still remains to be explored whether similar effects occur in response to facial images of the self. The proposed project builds upon a paradigm by Epley & Whitchurch (2008) by investigating whether gaining or loosing social power influences participants’ self-recognition and social judgements. This project is in collaboration with Dr Ana Guinote. Placement: 2 students Requirements: Ability to recruit 35 (14 female, 21 male) White/Caucasians (18-40 years) Literature: Epley, N., & Whitchurch, E. (2008). Mirror, mirror on the wall: Enhancement in self- recognition. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 1159-1170. Duguid, M.M., & Goncalo, J. A. (2011). The powerful overestimate their own height. Psychological Science, 23, 36-40. Haines, E. L., & Kray, L. J. (2005). Self-power associations: The possession of power impacts women’s self-concepts. European Journal of Social Psychology, 35, 643-662. Kraus, M. W., Chen, S., & Keltner, D. (2011). The power to be me: Power elevates self-concept consistency and authenticity. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 974-980. Welling, L.L.M., Moreau, B.J.P., Bird, B.M., Hansen, S., Carree, J.M. (2016). Exogenous testosterone increases men’s perceptions of their own physical dominance. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 64, 136-142
David Lagnado	UCL	Causal and evidential reasoning
Details Three interconnected streams: Exploring how people construct and use causal models; how they use causal models to make sense of complex evidence; how they use models to attribute responsibility
Winok Lapidaire	UCL	The impact of early nutrition on cognitive functioning in mature adults born preterm
Details The impact of early nutrition on cognitive functioning in mature adults born preterm Prematurity is a major cause of morbidity and a large burden on health care and special education resources (around £3 bn/ year in the UK). The most important adverse long-term outcomes of prematurity relate to the brain. Those born preterm have lower cognitive performance, on average a 12-point reduction in IQ, with deficits in specific cognitive functions such as arithmetic, nonverbal executive functions and behavioural difficulties. Nutrition is viewed as the single environmental variable with the widest range of possible effects on brain development. Our own studies and those of others show that, in humans, the developing brain is particularly vulnerable to nutritional insults prior to full term. The first randomised trials were conducted at ICH over 30 years ago with follow-up studies into adolescence showing major long term effects of preterm nutritional interventions on cognition, behaviour, educational performance and the incidence of neurodevelopmental impairment. Follow-up studies have been confined to infancy, childhood and occasionally adolescence. Our own research indicates that those born preterm have significant and unexpected decline in cognitive function tracked so far from childhood into adolescence, making further follow-up important to define the ultimate long-term outcome effects which are currently unknown. This project therefore proposes to examine the consequences of early nutrition in preterms on cognitive functioning and cerebral structure measured using a cognitive battery and MRI in mature adults in their early 30s when the brain is at its most developmentally stable. The cognitive assessment: · Behavioural outcomes – Achenbach system of Empirically Based Assessment and a life satisfaction questionnaire. · Overall cognitive level – the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence – II (WASI-II) · Attainments - We will use the Numerical Operations and Maths Reasoning sub-tests from the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test –II (WIAT-II) to assess numerical ability and the Adult Reading Test (ART)35 to measure reading accuracy and comprehension. · Memory - We will use the Verbal Paired Associates (Immediate, Delayed and Recognition scores) sub-test from the Wechsler Memory Scale – IV to assess relational learning and the Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test – 3 to obtain measures of impairment in certain aspects of everyday memory. · Executive Functions - We plan to use selected stand-alone subtests from the Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System (D-KEFS) to assess various aspects of frontal-lobe based tasks such as problem solving, concept formation and flexibility of thinking. · Visuo-spatial – We plan to use subtests that assess visual-spatial perception from the Visual Object and Space Perception Battery. · Speed We will measure speed of processing at two different levels. Simple and complex reaction time tasks will be administered via computer and be recorded in milliseconds. A Quick Test of Cognitive Speed will measure processing speed at a more cognitive level. Measures of height, weight and head circumference will be obtained, as well as information regarding educational achievements, socio-economic status (allowing determination of social mobility) and record of employment.
Nilli Lavie	UCL	Attention and cognitive control
Details Nilli Lavie, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience n.lavie@ucl.ac.uk Field of research: Attention and Cognitive control Projects are available in one of the four lines described below, as well as in other areas of our research interests (developed together with the individual student). 1) Time perception and attention: establish a new phenomenon of blindness to time under different types of processing load 2) Establishing the effects of motivation and reward on focused attention 3) Effects of attention on the pupil response 4) Establishing neural markers of “Inattentional deafness” using Magnetoencephalography (MEG) Current Research and Interests My research group focuses on the psychological and neural mechanisms of attention and distraction, cognitive control, visual awareness, working memory and emotion. We have a special focus on investigating information processing capacity and the effects of different types of information load on brain activity, cognitive function and task performance, neural correlates of awareness and executive frontal control of attention and behavior. We also study individual differences in attention abilities. To study these issues we use behavioral experiments (and visual psychophysics) combined with functional MRI, Magnetoencephalography (MEG), and measures of the eye pupil all in human subjects. PDF copies of papers from our lab and more information about our research can be found on our web site: http://www.icn.ucl.ac.uk/lavielab A few relevant papers: Cartwright-Finch, U. and Lavie, N. (2007). The role of perceptual load in Inattentional Blindness. Cognition, 102(3), 321-340 Macdonald, J. & Lavie, N. (2011) Visual perceptual load induces inattentional deafness. Attention Perception & Psychophysics, 73(6), 1780-1789 Lavie, N. (2010) Attention, Distraction and Cognitive Control under Load. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(3), 143-158. Lavie, N. (2005) Distracted and confused?: selective attention under load. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 75-82.
Will Lawn Val Curran	CEHP	CannTEEN: investigating differential longitudinal associations between cannabis use and cognitive function & mental health, in teenagers & adults.
Details We are looking for 2-4 masters students to work as part of our team in our large, cutting-edge MRC-funded study which is investigating whether teenagers are more vulnerable than adults to the potential non-acute (i.e. longer term) harms of cannabis. We are aiming to recruit 360 participants (90 teenage cannabis users, 90 teenage controls, 90 adult cannabis users and 90 controls) and we test each of them five times over one year. We carefully measure cannabis and other drug use, using detailed self-report and biological samples, as well as clinical interviews for substance use disorder. Our outcome variables include: working memory, episodic memory, impulsivity, cannabis dependence, effort-related decision-making, psychotic-like symptoms, depression, and anxiety. We are currently midway through this study, so some benefits of choosing this as your project are that: (1) it is an existing study that you can start work on straight away; (2) you will have a large sample. We are a large, friendly team, and you’ll receive lots of supervision. As we are assessing a number of outcome variables, there is scope for up to four students to work on this project. You would be able to choose the part of study that interests you most for your project.
Will Lawn Val Curran	CEHP	CannTEENa: examining the acute effects of cannabis with and without cannabidiol (CBD) on brain function, cognitive function and the subjective drug experience, in teenagers & adults.
Details We are looking for two masters students to work as part of our team in our large, cutting-edge MRC-funded study which is investigating the differential acute effects of cannabis (with and without cannabidiol - CBD) on brain and behaviour, in teenagers and adults. We are aiming to recruit 60 participants (30 teenage cannabis users and 30 adult cannabis users), with each participant administered cannabis with and without CBD, and matched placebo, in a double-blind, crossover design. We will measure brain function using fMRI, while participants complete tasks assessing: working memory, impulsivity and reward anticipation, as well as resting-state brain activity. Furthermore, we will assess: subjective response to the drug, psychotic-like symptoms, episodic memory, attentional bias and effort-related decision-making. This study will start soon, so you would help to set up and pilot the experiment, with data collection expected to begin in November/December 2018. You would be able to choose the part of the experiment that interests you most for your project. We are a large, friendly team, and you’ll receive lots of supervision.
Rebecca Lawson and Geraint Rees	Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging/ICN	Three different projects: autism, brain stimulation and defining the LGN on anatomical images	email: rebecca.lawson@ucl.ac.uk
Details The work of Dr Rebecca Lawson, a post-doc with Prof Geraint Rees, largely concerns sensory expectations and their violations. Current questions include how culture affects perceptual expectations, how non-invasive brain stimulation affects sensory learning and how ‘low-level’ visual regions may represent ‘higher-order’ expectations. Projects on offer 1) Eye gaze perception in autism spectrum disorders This project will involve running behavioural tasks in adults with autism and matched controls. The project concerns how adults with autism represent different eye gaze directions and tests predictions from computational models suggesting that a failure of divisive normalisation may underlie difficulties processing eye gaze in autism. Literature here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23583965 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ari_Rosenberg/publication/280534517_A_computational_perspective_on_autism/links/55b83c0808ae092e965880bd.pdf 2) Brain stimulation studies of sensory learning This study will use brain stimulation techniques (tDCS) to modulate sensory learning in healthy adults. Computational models (Hierarchical Gaussian Filter) of behaviour (Reaction Times) will be used to quantify tDCS induced changes in learning under uncertainty. Relevant literature here: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/30/9/3210.short http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00825/abstract 3) Defining the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus in human neuroimaging studies This project will involve working with high-resolution anatomical images of the human brain (data already collected). The LGN will be manually delineated and the size, volume and average location of the LGN will be quantified. The resulting project will resemble the following paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22986224 An exceptional student with previous experience of pattern classification analysis, may also be given the opportunity to analyse the BOLD imaging data that accompanies these structural images using multivariate decoding techniques. E.g: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v18/n4/full/nn.3967.html Requirements All projects require commitment, independence, good time keeping, organisational skills and a basic working understanding of statistics. Knowledge of Matlab – or a strong willingness/ability to learn - is highly desirable. Please send a CV to: rebecca.lawson@ucl.ac.uk and write a few words about the sort of project you might be interested in. website bit.ly/beckyneuro
Brad Love & Sebastian Bobadilla-Suarez	UCL	Computational modeling for neuroimaging
Details Our lab focuses on representational spaces. Current projects look at how to measure similarity between brain states, how to estimate the functional dimensionality of different brain regions, or at how attention has effects on neural representations. We leverage computational models to do inference on the operations realized by the human brain. If any of these topics interest you, please contact Prof. Brad Love (b.love@ucl.ac.uk) or Sebastian Bobadilla Suarez (sebastian.suarez.12@ucl.ac.uk).
Liam Mason	UCL	Neuro-computational mechanisms of mood instability
Details Project description: We are interested in how mood influences the choices people make and how this relates to mood disorders. Good moods may make us perceive rewards as being better than they actually are. This may drive us to pursue them more vigorously and to take bigger risks than we might normally take, something seen in mood disorders like bipolar disorder. · Can computational models inspired by neuroscience explain why shifts in mood bias our perception of rewards and our willingness to take risks? When is this mood bias helpful and when does it cause problems that might make people vulnerable to mood disorders? We conduct experiments in healthy participants and patients with bipolar disorder. · We also use a combination of lab-based tasks and those using online ‘big data’ platforms capable of collecting data from thousands of subjects. We are collaborating on developing a large scale smartphone app that will be released through the app store. This will involve working with our developer to translate existing experimental tasks from the lab into more playable versions on the app. · Neuroimaging: This project joins up with simultaneously acquired functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) data collected in patients with bipolar disorder. Students with existing experience of neuroimaging analysis will have the option to pose questions to these datasets. Research details: - Contribute to development of the task and recruit and test subjects. - Contribute to behavioural analysis using computational models of decision-making. - Contribute to neural analysis of simultaneous EEG-fMRI data Requirements: - Interest in the neuroscience of decision-making and emotion. - An interest in designing experiments in new online platforms (e.g. Gorilla) and/or Cogent Toolbox (Matlab) is strongly preferred - Prior experience with Matlab or any computer programming languages is preferred. - Prior experience testing human subjects in psychology experiments is preferred. - Will undertake safety training and operational training for MRI. Contact details: Please email l.mason@ucl.ac.uk with a paragraph about how you think the project would look, your availability, and your CV.
Sirous Mobini	UCL	Cognitive aspects of dysfunctional Impulsivity	Please contact Dr. Mobini for more information about this project
Details Please contact Dr. Mobini for more information about these project
Sirous Mobini	UCL	Cognitive bias modification for anxiety e.g. health anxiety, post-stroke anxiety	Please contact Dr. Mobini for more information about this project
Details Please contact Dr. Mobini for more information about these project
Andrew Nevins	UCL	Language Change as Iterated Chinese Whispers
Details Language Change as Iterated Chinese Whispers Language change can be thought of as an iterated sequence of 'Chinese Whispers' game writ large over many repeated mutations. Any model of long-term mutation should ideally be compatible with understanding the mechanisms of single mutations themselves. In this project we will make use of annotating and analyzing a database of over 2000 spontaneously notated slips of the ear -- moments in which utterances such as 'You minus the freakout mode' are perceived as 'You minus the free download'. Slips of the ear occur most often in noisy environments (e.g. pubs), over bad connections (e.g. cell phones), during dialect contact (where the allophonic rules may differ between speaker and hearer), and in song lyrics (where instrumental music and rhythmic demands may compromise clarity). The input and output of this perception process are best modeled by taking into account factors such as consonant identification cues, stressed vs. unstressed syllables, and word boundary ambiguity. The goal of this project will be to produce a 'confusion matrix' of slips of the ear, analyzing the mechanisms that give rise to them and attempting to illustrate their applicability for understanding the recurrent and categorical slips that ultimately constitute one source of language change.
Andrew Nevins	UCL	Pitch changes in drunken speech
Details Pitch Changes in Drunken Speech Supervisors: Andrew Nevins – a.nevins@ucl.ac.uk Kevin Tang – kevin.tang.10@ucl.ac.uk Department: Department of Linguistics Title: Pitch variability in intoxicated speech by tonal language speakers (particularly Mandarin Chinese/Yoruba) Summary: Previously studies with intoxicated speech have consistently shown that pitch varies significantly more in intoxicated conditions than in sober conditions. (Johnson, Pisoni & Bernacki 1990) A question that arises from this finding is whether this pitch variability with alcohol also applies to speakers of tonal languages, such as Mandarin Chinese and Yoruba. Given that in tonal languages, pitch is used primarily to encode lexical differences and therefore bears a high functional load, the hypothesis would be that the pitch variability due to alcohol would be smaller in tonal languages than non-tonal languages. In this project, you will test whether the effect of alcohol on pitch variability in tonal languages differs from that in non-tonal languages. You will conduct a production experiment, which involves reading a play/dialogue with participants in both sober and drunk conditions; administering alcohol to participants; measuring alcohol levels using a breath-analyser. You will subsequently analyse the results. (Training and guidance will be provided in nearly all of the stages). [This project has UCL ethics approval.] What the project will offer you: •Experience with a novel methodology of using alcohol, and applying it in linguistics and speech science •Experience with talking with intoxicated participants, mixing basic cocktails and using a breathanalyser. •Experience with recording speech materials in a professional recording environment; •Experience with acoustic data analysis; •Experience with conducting experiments in linguistics and speech science. Required skills: •Native speaker knowledge of a tonal language (particularly Mandarin Chinese or Yoruba); •No known language-related impairments (e.g. speaking/listening/reading); •Ability to think and work independently; •Basic Statistics skills (SPSS / R / Excel); •Some knowledge of Praat (training and guidance will be provided). Required commitment: The project will require ~30 hours of data collection. Tasks include preparing the production experiment (stimulus material, consent forms, experimental instructions, and running sheets), recruiting the participants, preparing the recordings for analysis, conducting the production experiment, participating in data analysis). Recommended Reading: Johnson, K., Pisoni, D. B., & Bernacki, R. H. (1990). Do voice recordings reveal whether a person is intoxicated? A case study. Phonetica, 47(3-4), 215-237. Chin, S. B., & Pisoni, D. B. (1997). Alcohol and speech. Academic Press.
Andrew Nevins	UCL	Speech perception in Mandarin Chinese
Details Speech perception in Mandarin Chinese Supervisors: Andrew Nevins – a.nevins@ucl.ac.uk Kevin Tang – kevin.tang.10@ucl.ac.uk Department: Department of Linguistics Title: Speech mis-segmentation in Mandarin Chinese Summary: As you are reading this sentence, the blank spaces and the letters are providing you with reliable information of word boundaries and of corresponding acoustic sounds, however our speech perceptual system does not have these privileges as speech is often a continuous acoustic signal with very few interruptions and can be distorted with noise. (Mattys, White, & Melhorn, 2005). Cutler & Butterfield (1992) have shown that in English, speakers would mis-segment speech depending on whether a syllable is stressed or not, e.g. “Soon the poLICE were waiting” was misperceived as “Soothe the LEAST where waiting” (The bold and capitalised letters denotes a stressed syllable). The study suggested that this is due the fact that English is a trochaic language, that is with a lot more words with the stressed pattern, strong-weak (e.g. BOttle, Water etc.) than weak-strong, (e.g. giRAFFE, haRASS etc.) The literature has a mixed view about whether Mandarin Chinese is also a trochaic language like English. A question that arises from this is whether Mandarin Chinese would have the same mis-segmentation pattern as English. The hypothesis would be that if Mandarin Chinese speakers would mis-segment speech the same as English, then it would suggest that it is a trochaic language. In this project, you will follow the footsteps of Cutler & Butterfield (1992) but with Mandarin Chinese. You will conduct a perception experiment, which involves recording Chinese sentences, presenting the sentences to participants, and analysing the participants' responses. (Guidance and training will be provided in all of the stages). [This project has UCL ethics approval.] What the project will offer you: •Experience with recording speech materials in a professional recording environment; •Experience with interacting with participants •Experience with conducting experiments in linguistics and speech science. Required skills: •Native speaker knowledge of Mandarin Chinese •No known language-related impairments (e.g. speaking/listening/reading); •Ability to think and work independently; •Basic Statistics skills (SPSS / R / Excel); Required commitment: The project will require ~20 hours of data collection. Tasks include preparing the perception experiment (the stimulus material, consent forms, experimental instructions, and running sheets), recruiting the participants, preparing the responses for analysis, conducting the perception experiment, participating in data analysis). Recommended Reading: Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (1992). Rhythmic cues to speech segmentation: Evidence from juncture misperception. Journal of Memory and Language, 31(2), 218-236. Mattys, S. L., White, L., & Melhorn, J. F. (2005). Integration of multiple speech segmentation cues: a hierarchical framework. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134(4), 477.
Keith O Brien & Adam Harris	Simply Business	Applied Behavioral Science
Details Please see attached word doc
Alexandra Perovic	UCL	Various studies on language development in typically and atypically developing children
Details Dr. Alexandra Perovic, research projects for non-clinical degrees 1. What is the link between language and numeracy in individuals with Williams syndrome? Dr Alexandra Perovic and Dr Chris Donlan, University College London It is well known that people with Williams syndrome have difficulties with counting and number skills. However, the language abilities of people with Williams syndrome are known to be relatively good, and often superior to their number abilities. The question that we would like to explore is whether people with Williams are able to use and understand words referring to quantity (known as ‘quantifiers’): every, all, some, in addition to the actual number words (‘numerals’): one, two, three, four. We also want to see how this knowledge is related to practical counting skills. Quantifiers and numerals are similar in terms of their language function, and research with typically developing children shows that the language of number is interwoven with the development of number concepts and skills. Our study aims to explore this question further, and to examine the relation between language and number in people with Williams syndrome. This study will help us to understand the reasons for their particular difficulties with number, and will help teachers and families to support number learning more effectively. The study began in September 2010, thus the ethics approval is already in place. So far around 35 typically developing control children have been tested, and 2 adolescents with WS. We need to test further 15 typically developing children, aged 6-8, and around 20 children and adolescents with WS. Individuals with WS are being recruited with the help of Williams Syndrome Foundation, but typically developing controls will be recruited by the students on this project. We need one more MSc student, CRB checked, to join our team: Alex and Chris, the principal investigators, and Emily, Year B student, MSc Speech Sciences. 2. Complex Grammar in Autism Spectrum Disorders Dr Alexandra Perovic, University College London, Dr Vikki Janke, University of Kent This project investigates aspects of complex grammar in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and typically developing children, in particular, the ‘control’ structures, involving verbs such as ‘promise’ and ‘persuade’ (Homer promised Marge to read a book, vs. Homer persuaded Marge to read a book). Comparisons of language abilities in different populations help answer the more general question of how syndrome-specific impairments can affect language acquisition, and especially which modules of the language faculty (e.g. syntax vs. pragmatics) are most affected. An understanding of the interaction between language and cognition in ASD will also provide insight into how these systems interact in typical development. In this experimental study, children with ASD will be compared to typically developing children on measures of non-verbal abilities, as well as verbal abilities. The project has been approved by UCL Ethics Committee and has been running for several months now. The students who join our team will have to obtain CRB clearance. They will be responsible for administering standardized tests of verbal and non-verbal abilities and the language task (shown to participants on a laptop computer) to 10-20 typically developing children, aged 6-9, and potentially to several children with autism (aged 12-18). The recruitment of children with autism and typically developing controls has already started, and some children have been tested on both the standardized tests and the experimental task. The students will be trained in how to administer all the tasks, and will be accompanied by Alex and Vikki if testing children with autism. 3. Metaphor comprehension in Autism Spectrum Disorder Dr Alexandra Perovic, Dr Nausicaa Pouscoulous This study examines autistic children’s understanding of metaphors - linguistic expressions whose interpretation goes beyond literal meaning, for which both syntactic and pragmatic abilities are utilized. Known for their impaired pragmatic abilities, individuals with autism generally have difficulties with interpreting metaphors. This study will be the first to use the method of novel metaphor, used by Dr. Nausicaa Pouscoulous in her work with TD children. Comparisons of language abilities in different populations will help answer the more general question of how syndrome-specific impairments can affect language acquisition, and especially which modules of the language faculty (e.g. syntax vs. pragmatics) are most affected. An understanding of the interaction between language and cognition in ASD will also provide insight into how these systems interact in typical development. In this experimental study, children with ASD will be compared to typically developing children on measures of non-verbal abilities, as well as verbal abilities. The project has been approved by UCL Ethics Committee and has been running for several months now. The student who joins our team will have to obtain CRB clearance and will be responsible for administering standardized tests of verbal and non-verbal abilities and the metaphor task to typically developing children, aged 6-9, and to several children with autism, aged 12-18. The recruitment of participants has already started. We need one more MSc student to join our team: Alex and Nausicaa, the principal investigators, and Anisa, Year B student, MSc Speech Sciences.
Toby Pilditch & David Lagnado	UCL	Various Evidential Reasoning Projects
Details Several projects are available. Projects will explore various topics within evidential, probabilistic, and causal reasoning. This is based on work relating to the domain of Intelligence Analysis. It looks to improve the understanding of how reasoners actually (vs should) deal with uncertainty, so as to accurately make diagnoses (inferring from known effects to probable causes), and predictions (inferring from known causes to probable effects).
Jean-Baptiste Pingault and Essi Viding	PALS	Causal inference in psychopathology: innovative methods to identify causal risk factors for psychopathology	Please contact Dr. Pingault for this project
Details It is anticipated to most likely be of interest to students on the Research Methods Course. Background: Identifying modifiable environmental exposures that are causally related to psychopathology is crucial for designing effective evidence-based social policies and interventions. To date, however, establishing whether a correlation between a risk factor (e.g. low birth weight) and a psychopathology-related outcome (e.g. hyperactivity) reflects a truly causal relationship or a spurious association remains a major challenge. This is because observational studies are biased and give rise to many non-causal associations between risk factors and outcomes. The research conducted for this project will use innovative designs to address this issue and make stronger causal inference. Such approaches can have a great impact on our causal understanding of the development of psychopathology and have important implications in terms of interventions and policies. The problem of confounding: In observational studies, there is a major problem of confounding, which can lead to the observed associations between different types of substances even without the presence of true causal relationships. However, innovative statistical approaches and quasi-experimental designs can help us to make better causal inference. The research will implement such methods on large longitudinal studies such as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. Examples of projects can be: -The role of low birth weight on early psychopathology. Low birth weight has been associated with symptoms like hyperactivity/impulsivity symptoms. However, why this is the case is still unclear. We can use the discordant identical twin design to address this question (i.e. verify whether the twin with the lower birth weight also has long-term elevated hyperactivity/impulsivity symptoms, which indicates a likely causal relationships). - Use longitudinal structural equation modelling (e.g. cross-lagged modelling) to examine reciprocal causal associations between the use of different type of substances (e.g. tobacco and alcohol). Opportunities for learning: This project represents a great opportunity to work on a large longitudinal population-based cohort. The student will be closely supervised and have the opportunity to learn R software and advanced statistical modelling such as structural equation modelling, which will constitute an extremely valuable long-term asset.
Jean-Baptiste Pingault and Tabea Schoeler	PALS	Acute cognitive and psychological responses following substance use	Please contact Dr. Pingault for this project
Details Acute cognitive and psychological responses following substance use The project will involve designing an online survey project assessing the acute cognitive and psychological effects following substance use in the general population. The aim of the survey is to obtain more detailed assessments on subjective experiences following the use of different psychoactive substances, such as alcohol, nicotine, cannabis and other illicit substances. The students will be involved in the design of the survey, the data collection and the analysis of the survey data, with the opportunity to tailor the content of the survey depending on their interests. The students will be working collaboratively with other researchers from lab that are involved in the survey and will be supervised by Dr Jean-Baptiste Pingault and Dr Tabea Schoeler throughout the different parts of the project. Possible research questions could include: 1. What is the prevalence of acute cognitive impairments (e.g. memory/attention problems) and psychological problems (e.g. mood, psychosis-like) following substance use (e.g. cannabis) in the general population? 2. Are different patterns of substance use (e.g. for cannabis: route of use, type of cannabis used) associated with individual differences in cognitive and psychological responses to the substance? 3. Do the acute effects of a particular substance depend on individual factors, such as gender, age, personality or history of previous substance use (e.g. age of onset, comorbid use of other drugs)?
Nausicaa Pouscoulous	UCL	Implicit communication, speaker commitment and plausible deniability
Details In collaboration with Francesca Bonalumi (Central European University) and Johannes Mahr (Central European University) Communication relies on trust and we expect speakers to be committed to what they say. Yet, what is expressed in conversion is not always conveyed literally and pragmatic phenomena where the meaning of an utterance is contextually adjusted are the norm rather than the exception. Think, for instance, of: - Everyone (in our group) will go to the party! - I don’t know where to put the flowers, the vase fell on the floor (and broke). - Of course, she will help she’s an angel (a kind human)! Recently some studies started looking at how speakers infer speaker commitment; commitment appears to be modulated by meaning relations (e.g., saying, presupposing, implicating) and speakers are taken to be less committed to a message communicated implicitly (Mazzarella, Reinecke, Noveck & Mercier, 2018). This project uses web-based questionnaires to investigate how hearers construe the meaning-commitment relation examining how the meaning conveyed through various pragmatic phenomena is deniable and how accountable the speaker is held for it. This project involves setting up on-line questionnaires for adult participants. Suggested readings: Doran, R., Ward, G., Larson, M., McNabb, Y., & Baker, R. E. (2012). A novel experimental paradigm for distinguishing between what is said and what is implicated. Language, 88(1), 124-154. Lee, J. J., & Pinker, S. (2010). Rationales for indirect speech: The theory of the strategic speaker. Psychological review 117(3), 785-807. Mazzarella, D., Reinecke, R., Noveck, I. & Mercier, H. (2018). Saying, presupposing and implicating: How pragmatics modulates commitment. Journal of Pragmatics, 133: 15-27.
Nausicaa Pouscoulous & Alexandra Perovic	UCL	Metaphor comprehension in Autism Spectrum Disorder & Down syndrome
Details Comprehension of figurative language requires both linguistic and non-linguistic skills. It is documented to be fairly poor in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), but suspected to be unproblematic in Down syndrome (DS). This study is the first to investigate comprehension of novel (rather than previously researched conventional) metaphors in these populations, thereby providing a more detailed picture of their pragmatic competence relative to their general linguistic and cognitive abilities. To determine where the difficulties arise - insufficient vocabulary knowledge, incapacity to take into account the context or interference of the literal meaning - we will use two methods recently developed for very young typical children, which minimise the cognitive demands involved in the process of metaphor comprehension, while still being suitable to populations with compromised intellectual and linguistic aptitudes such as ASD and DS. Student who wish to work with typically developing children – and possibly ASD children or children with Down syndrome – can contact us. This project has already been approved by the ethics committee. This project involves working with young children so students who are interested should apply for an enhanced DBS check.
Nichola Raihani	UCL	Social behaviour in humans
Details I would be interested in offering projects for students interested in social behaviour or decision making in a social context. Humans are among the most cooperative species on the planet- we regularly go out of our way to help others, even people we have never met or do not expect to meet in the future. I am interested in what prompts this pro social behaviour. At the same time, we can also ask under what conditions humans become less pro social and more self centred. The projects I would supervise would also be suitable for students with an interest in behaviour change, behavioural economics or evolution of behaviour. Some of the recent research we have been working on also looks at how personality traits such as psychopathy and paranoia affect social cognition and behaviour. We are an open science lab and are striving to pre-register all experiments where possible. Students working in my lab are typically expected to produce a piece of publishable research (and to be involved in the production of the peer-reviewed article, from inception to publication). Students interested in working with the Social Evolution & Behaviour Lab should visit our webpage, http://seb-lab.org, to learn more about our research interests and current projects, and to come up with ideas for a research project.
David Raune and Julianna Onwumere	Clinical Psychologist, Early Intervention in Psychosis Service, CNWL	Clinically-Related Projects Currently Available for Postgraduate Students (Sept. 2016)	Please see Word document for further information
Details Clinically-Related Projects Currently Available for Postgraduate Students (Sept. 2016) All projects designed and supervised by Dr David Raune (Clinical Psychologist, Early Intervention in Psychosis Service, CNWL), with Dr Julianna Onwumere (Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, IOPPN) supervising the paper-writing stage. All data is already collected. Students need to be able to attend The Pembroke Centre in Ruislip Manor (HA48NQ) for Supervision weekly or fortnightly and stay involved with the project until the paper is accepted for publication. 1) Test of the cognitive model of caring in early course psychosis (N=100+). We have 50+ pairs (N=100+) of early course psychosis carers psychological need assessments (key illness beliefs, subjective burden, depression, anxiety, coping, burnout, positive experiences) on the same patient with two carers (e.g. Mother and Father). This opportunity permits a simple yet unique test of the cognitive model of caregiving: Which carer outcomes are the same and which are different when caring for the same psychosis patient? The results relate to theoretical models of carers psychological needs and early clinical interventions to reduce those needs and enhance carers well-being. All data is already inputted to SPSS. 2) Predictors of early course psychosis carers psychological experiences (N=225+). The project is to test - in the largest sample to date - demographic, social and psychological predictors of carers early psychological needs and positive exigencies. The results relate to theoretical models of carers psychological experiences and identifying which early course carer-patient duos should be prioritised for intervention. All data is already inputted to SPSS. 3) Pilot study of cognitive group psychoeducation for early course psychosis carers (N=20): Early course psychosis carers key beliefs about psychosis are influential in their own and psychosis patients mental health. We tested if a Single-Session of a specifically devised new syllabus of cognitive group psychoeducation could improve carers key illness beliefs. We will also compare the results to a three-session intervention format we ran and presented at the 2015 BABCP conference (N=149, Onwumere et al, submitted). If the results are positive then the format could be tested in larger more rigorous design and perhaps rolled out in Early Intervention in Psychosis services as an effective yet economically viable intervention for the thousands of new psychosis carers each year. Data needs to be inputted to SPSS. 4) Structure of early course psychosis carers psychological experiences (N=225+). The project is to identify the structure - for example the severity, spread and interconnectedness - of new carers negative and positive psychological experiences. For example, are psychological needs spread evenly across carers or does there exist a subgroup who are multiply afflicted? Results relate to theoretical models of carers and the identification of needs in carers and carers in need. All data is already inputted into SPSS. Dr David Raune, Clinical Psychologist, Early Intervention in Psychosis Service, CNWL Foundation Trust, The Pembroke Centre, 90 Pembroke Road, Ruislip Manor, London HA48NQ. Email: david.raune@nhs.net. telephone: 07851428916.
Costi Rezlescu	UCL	An analysis of data quality in online psychology experiments
Details We will compare data quality in three classic experimental tasks across various software platforms and subject pools
Costi Rezlescu	UCL	Develop a new tool to identify healthy lottery play
Details Project will involve collaborating with the National Lottery (their Behavioral Science unit)
Costi Rezlescu	UCL	How do we process inverted faces?
Details This project will investigate the hypothesis that inverted faces are processed by domain-general (object) recognition mechanisms, whereas only upright faces are processed by face-specific mechanisms.
Costi Rezlescu	UCL	How do we recognise unfamiliar faces?
Details Some researchers argue that familiar and unfamiliar faces are processed by different mechanisms. This project will investigate the role of facial expressions and impressions (e.g. trustworthiness) in the recognition of unfamiliar faces
Costi Rezlescu	UCL	Human vs. AI in medical decision-making: Who do we trust more?
Details This project will build on an MSc research project from last year - we will examine the factors that can promote/hinder trust in medical decisions reached by AI
Costi Rezlescu	UCL	Identifying the types of perceptual deficits in prosopagnosia
Details Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a disorder characterised by lifelong impairment in face recognition. Past remedial training attempts were one-fits-all programs that showed limited success in improving face perception in individuals with DP. The aim is to develop a novel training paradigm based on the idea that different perceptual deficits can lead to prosopagnosia. The project would have two parts: 1) identify the various types of perceptual deficits behind prosopagnosia; 2) build remedial training for each type of prosopagnosia. Strong programming skills and knowledge of principal component analysis highly desirable.
Costi Rezlescu	UCL	Is the inversion effect specific to faces?
Details Recent evidence has suggested that very large inversion effects may be obtained with highly homogeneous cars, not only with faces. This project will investigate if the findings generalise to other non-face stimuli and aim to identify the properties needed to produce large (face-like) inversion effects.
Daniel Richardson	UCL	Collective behaviour, performance and teaching
Details Why do people gather together, sometimes at great cost and inconvenience, to experience live performances of music, drama, dance and education? Technology can deliver a rich perceptual experience to the home or a mobile device. Yet more people watch live artistic performances in the UK than watch all live sports combined. In universities, we still gather together for lectures, when there is the option to watching lecturecast recordings at home. Our aim is uncover the psychological consequences of these experiences, from the perspective of both the audience and the performer. Using sensors to detect motion, heart rate and skin conductance, we will map physiological signals onto phenomenology of being engaged in the performance as a spectator; or the or feeling of connecting with the audience as a performer. We will test the hypothesis that engagement in a live performance is related to synchrony between audience members' collective physiology, and it the experience of this synchrony that is absent in recorded performance. We see if the same psychology explains why people still prefer live lectures, and whether there is a learning advantage to attending a live lecture.
Daniel Richardson	UCL	Parklife: A mass participation experiment into the psychological roots of societal self harm
Details Collective acts of societal self-harm, ranging from littering to rioting, have been studied extensively from a sociological and political perspective, but it has proved difficult to investigate them from a psychological perspective because of the practical challenges involved in experimentally manipulating the behaviour of a large number of individuals interacting in real time. This project will develop a mass participation game, Parklife, that can be played online or amongst large groups of people, in which teams of players can develop or vandalise a virtual park. By engaging hundreds of people and manipulating factors within the game - shown by previous research to drive societal self- harm - the researchers aim to produce causal experimental evidence that will complement existing scholarship and make an important contribution to the ongoing policy debate on the effects of social inequality.
Oliver Robinson		The impact of anxiety on cognition
Details We study the neurobiology of adaptive and pathological anxiety. Three project areas: 1) The impact of selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) on the neural and computational mechanisms of anxiety: -will require working with and recruiting from clinical populations -will require working in fMRI environment 2) The impact of threat of shock induced anxoety on approach and withdrawal responses in healthy humans: -requires ability to (learn to) code up your own tasks 3) Reliability of measures of anxiety and cognition -test retest of a currently programmed cognitive task battery If you are interested please contact Oliver Robinson (o.robinson@ucl.ac.uk)
Jenni Rodd	Experimental Psychology	Developing Web-based Assessments of Vocabulary Knowledge
Details BACKGROUND Fluent communication requires sophisticated, flexible knowledge about what words mean and how they can be used in different linguistic contexts. Individuals vary widely in the quality of their vocabulary knowledge. Poor vocabulary knowledge is strongly associated with poor performance on general measures of communication skill, and has substantial, life-long impact, in terms of academic attainment and occupational status. Evidence-based methods for improving vocabulary learning across the lifespan can potentially increase social mobility and narrow the gap between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers, but the success of such interventions relies on the use of effective, appropriate screening tests to accurately measure vocabulary knowledge at different ages. AIM The aim of this project is to develop fun, engaging child-friendly web-based tests of vocabulary knowledge. Potential methods will likely be piloted using adult participants to assess their validity. The challenge will be to develop a method that is suitable for a range of types of words and that can be adapted for use in pre-readers.
Jenni Rodd	Experimental Psychology	How do bilinguals learn new meanings for words they already know?
Details BACKGROUND We must often learn new meanings for words we already know, for example due to language evolving (e.g., the social media meanings of ‘tweet’ and ‘troll’) or starting a new hobby (e.g., the sailing meaning of ‘boom’). New word meanings are normally acquired incidentally by deriving them from context when reading/listening, rather than through intentional memorisation of definitions. Research on this topic has focused on monolinguals, and has revealed that learning new word meanings is much better when these meanings are related to the word’s existing meaning. AIM This project will explore new word-meaning learning in bilingual participants. Specifically, it will determine whether bilingual participants are influenced by their knowledge of their mother tongue when learning new words in their second language. Bilingual participants will read short stories in their second language that containing new meanings for words that already exist either in their first or second language. Participants’ learning will be measured through tests of cued recall of the new meanings for the known words. The specific impact of their knowledge of their first language will be assessed by comparing their performance to a group of monolingual participants. This project is ideally suited to students with a good knowledge of a language that has similar spelling patterns to English (e.g., Dutch, German).
Jenni Rodd	Experimental Psycholgy	Learning new words from printed books, ebooks and audio books.
Details BACKGROUND Despite widespread acceptance that implicit learning from natural linguistic environments (e.g., conversations, books, TV) is the main source of vocabulary learning, most experiments use highly artificial stimuli, tasks and learning conditions. The current project focuses exclusively on learning from naturally occurring linguistic stimuli, i.e. stimuli that are not created by the experimenters and that could be encountered in everyday life. Attempts to boost children’s language skills currently tend to highlight the importance of reading. Very significant money and time are expended by teachers and parents in encouraging reluctant readers to read. Perhaps surprisingly little is known about the specific benefits for vocabulary development of reading relative to other story formats. AIM The aim of this project is to observe how word learning is influenced by the format in which the stories are presented. Books like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series provide an ideal opportunity to observe vocabulary learning ‘in the wild’ – when readers encounter words like “muggle” and “quidditch” they have no prior knowledge of these words and so any observed learning can directly be attributed to their experience within the novels. However these books are now too widely read to be suitable for experiments, so for this project it will be necessary to select a different, less widely read book to be used as the core material. Adult participants will be randomly assigned to three conditions: paper book reading, electronic book reading, audio book listening. Participants will be asked to record how much time they spend reading the book and their reading progress (measured in chapters). Web-based vocabulary tests will be conducted as readers near the end of the book designed to monitor their learning of new words (e.g., “muggle”) to see if there are differences in how quickly/effectively people have learned words from the different formats.
Stuart Rosen	UCL	Understanding Speech (3 projects)
Details Stuart Rosen stuart@phon.ucl.ac.uk 1/ Assessing talker intelligibility There is much current interest in the question of why some talkers are easier to understand than others. In this project, we will try to take a new approach to assessing talker intelligibility by determining which talkers are most intelligible when they are masked by a similar sentence spoken by other talkers, and by themselves. An important part of the project will be obtaining appropriate recordings from up to a dozen talkers who can then be assessed for intelligibility. 2/ Learning to understand rotated speech: the role of intonation (with Tim Green) There is currently much interest in the degree to which listeners can adapt to speech that has been transformed or distorted in some way, not least because this has obvious implications for users of hearing aids and cochlear implants. One particular question concerns the extent to which a natural intonation pattern could help in adapting to a distortion, even though the intonation itself contributes relatively little to the intelligibility of speech overall. In this study we will use rotated speech, in which the high frequencies are mapped to the low and vice versa. Although unintelligible at first, listeners have been shown to be able to learn to understand rotated speech, although it is a difficult task. In this study, we will compare the extent to which normal listeners can adapt to rotated speech when they are trained either with speech materials that have a natural intonation contour, or ones in which the intonation contour has been flattened artificially. 3/ Understanding sine-wave speech There is currently much interest in listeners' abilities to understand speech that has been degraded in various ways. Much has been written about the perception of sine-wave speech (SWS) in which the formants of speech are replaced by sine waves varying in frequency and amplitude. Although these sounds have an odd bird-like quality, much of them can be understood when people are told they are speech. In this project, we will explore the extent to which SWS (and various transformations of it which change the quality of the sound, but not the information in it) are recognised and understood by naive listeners. This project would be ideal for someone interested in basic theories of speech perception. No special technical knowledge is necessary.
Aman Saleem	UCL	Is perception of speed altered by self-motion?
Details Understanding how the brain processes visual images is a fundamental question in neuroscience. As we constantly move around in the world, changes in the visual scene are largely generated by our own movements. This is particularly true for visual features related to motion and flow, and our perception of speed can be altered by movement. In this project, we will investigate movement-dependent changes in speed perception, using visual psychophysics with head-mounted displays.
Andrea Santi	UCL	Attachment preferences in processing English sentences
Details Attachment preferences in Processing English Sentences. There has been a long literature about differences in attachment preferences across languages for sentences like "Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony”. The relative clause "who was on the balcony" can either modify "the actress" or "the servant". Most English speakers prefer to attach low (ie, to modify the actress). In other languages (eg, Spanish), there is a preference for high attachment. These results have led to the undesirable conclusion that there are different parsing preferences across languages. Recently Grillo (2012) has pointed out that these diffrences in preference may relate to differences in the syntax across these languages. The project offered would be to test this theory in English through a questionnaire and (possibly) a self-paced reading study.
Andrea Santi	UCL	Passives in cross-modal lexical priming
Details Passives in cross-modal lexical priming. There have been many theoretical accounts of the syntactic structure of passives ('Mary was kissed by Bill') where Mary is the subject of the sentence but the one undergoing the action (but not the agent). Previous work on the processing of these structures found that while they appear to be more complex than active sentences (Bill kissed Mary) on a number of offline measures, the online results provide a different picture. To clarify this issue, we offer a project that will use the Cross Modal Lexical Priming technique while correcting for some potential problems with the stimuli and methods of previous studies.
Anne Schlottmann	UCL Experimental Psychology	Child cognitive development
Details Anne Schlottmann, Experimental Psychology, UCL, a.schlottmann@ucl.ac.uk I work on typical cognitive development in children, mostly on children’s reasoning, and I also work on causal reasoning and perception in adults, as well as children. I am happy to supervise projects with both children and adults in 1819. Below you find some more specific ideas and areas for projects. (1) YOUNG CHILDREN’S UNDERSTANDING OF MATERIALS/SUBSTANCES, THEIR “INTUITIVE CHEMISTRY”: We know a lot about children’s intuitive physics, psychology, biology, but very little is known about their intuitive chemistry, their understanding of the materials and substances of which the objects/bodies in their world are composed. I am particularly interested in children’s understanding of mixing of substances, e.g., when solid and liquid mix, the solid may dissolve, or there may just be a suspension, or there may be a reaction. Chemistry teaching only starts in key stage 2, but I investigate primary school children’s natural understanding of such phenomena, which traditionally are believed to be beyond young children. We have already found that even 5-year-olds can understand dissolving (Hill, Schlottmann, Ellefson, Taber, Tse, & Yung, 2014) and even simple chemical reactions and I’d be very keen to take on students to explore this further. Chemistry A level might be helpful, but not required, as this is really simple “pre-chemistry”, though you should have enjoyed your GCSE chemistry especially the practical aspects. This year I’d like to study, for example, whether and how children understand that if I mix 1 cup of red, hot, sweet juice with another cup of red, hot, sweet juice, I end up with 2 cups of juice, but the juice is not twice as red, hot or sweet. Previous research suggests children have extreme difficulties with this (Stavy et al., 1982; Dixon & Moore, 1991; Jaeger & Wilkening, 2001), but our own research suggests a different picture. (2) CHILDREN’S IDEAS OF FAIRNESS IN TEAMS: I’d also be keen for a student to work on a social cognition project jointly supervised with Karla Koskuba and David Lagnado to look at how children assign “fair” reward and responsibility for an outcome jointly produced by members of a team to these team members. This follows up on Gerstenberg & Lagnado’s (2010) study on responsibility attribution in adults, but our initial study with children found quite a different picture for reward distribution (Koskuba, Gerstenberg, Gordon, Lagnado, & Schlottmann, 2018). New studies will investigate the discrepancy, considering how what children think is a fair reward links to their view of the causal role the individual played in producing the outcome. This project can be seen as a look at the emergence of children’s “natural” morals. (3) I AM ALSO INTERESTED IN JUDGEMENT-DECISION STUDIES WITH CHILDREN: For the general approach, see Schlottmann & Wilkening (2011). There are multiple topics I would like to study here, for instance, the study of children’s understanding of skill-related uncertainty in motor and cognitive tasks, or their understanding of everyday risks in health, traffic, school, or other everyday situations in which children encounter uncertainty and probability. This is in contrast to the standard gambling tasks of the JDM literature, which are far removed from everyday experience. I am also interested in the relation between children’s choices and their judgments -- children typically are far better at judging their options than at making decisions between them. Or I am interested in projects studying biases in children’s decision-making and how they may be overcome, or in cross-cultural study of the development of judgment and decision-making. (4) PERCEPTION OF CAUSALITY: These are studies co-supervised with Christos Bechlivanidis. See next project Some of my papers on various topics are at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/cogdev Please note that projects with children need to be planned in advance, so speak to me now about the practicalities, do not wait until December, as it does take a bit of time to find schools in which to test children, get permission from parents etc. If you already have a connection (your old school, the school/youth group in which you volunteered etc) this helps! You should be a fluent speaker of UK English if you plan on testing children here, and if English is your 2nd language, you might also consider testing children in your home country instead. In this case you may have to get local permissions and ethics approval (e.g., Singapore students have to go through the Singapore Ministry of Education.) If testing in the UK, you will need an advanced DBS (Disclosure and barring service) check, which may take some weeks ( http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hr/docs/working_with_children.php) We will give support, training and advice at all stages, but these prelimininaries can take a while. If this puts you off, do also consider that at the end you have not only a research project but also much valuable experience of working in an institution and of working with children, which may be helpful for the next step in your career.
Anne Schlottmann & Christos Bechlivanidis	UCL Experimental Psychology	Causal perception in adults (and perhaps children)
Details Anne Schlottmann & Christos Bechlivanidis, Experimental Psychology, UCL, a.schlottmann@ucl.ac.uk, c.bechlivanidis@ucl.ac.uk We share an interest in in causal reasoning and perception and would be happy to co-supervise students in this area, either conducting online studies with adults or person-to-person studies with children. We have two current sets of projects: 1) PERCEPTUAL CAUSALITY IN COMPLEX ENVIRONMENTS: This line of work extends the approach pioneered in Michotte's famous studies of perceptual causality (Michotte, 1963). Michotte argued that sometimes, causality can be seen directly, and is essentially a Gestalt property of certain motion sequences. Michotte’s approach is so attractive because it explains how humans (including babies from birth) can be sensitive to simple forms of causality, when 2000 years of philosophy has not led to much agreement even on how to define the concept. Here we focus on the argument that perceptual causality could help us parse the event stream to determine the causal structure of our complex environment, without requiring much reasoning or problem-solving. This is an attractive claim, yet there are no data, as virtually all studies involve only two objects moving on similar paths in otherwise empty space. Here, we extend study to situations involving many moving objects on multiple trajectories, which is closer to the real world. In the simplest paradigm, we consider how causality judgments in such a complex world might differ (or not) from that in a two object environment. Another approach is to consider visual search for causality in such complex worlds, to explore whether perceptual causality confers advantages for attention. 2) CAUSALITY IN UNREALISTIC EVENTS: According to all relevant psychological theories, we should only consider a perceived sequence of events as causal if it (more or less) conforms to what is real or at least possible. Yet, this makes causal learning of genuinely new relations very difficult. It would also not seem to fit with our willingness to accept unrealistic forms of causality in movies or in magic shows, despite knowledge that this is not real-life causality. We have already done a series of studies showing that adults are very happy to treat various animated, unrealistic events (treated as non-causal in the Michotte literature) as causal on initial encounter – the events are re-evaluated and become non-causal only if there are repeated encounters that allow comparison to a more standard, realistic causal event, but prior to such comparison people entertain a quite wide range of unrealistic causal hypotheses. We would now like to extend the approach to look at people’s reaction to magic and to photo-realistic events “that should not be”. This project requires students who are either magicians, or who have very good video-editing skills, to produce the unrealistic events for testing. 3) BOTH PROJECTS COULD ALSO BE ADAPTED FOR WORK WITH CHILDREN.
Sophie Scott	ICN	Evaluating individual differences in laughter
Details I have developed a questionnaire to look at people's perceptions of laughter, and I would like to collect some data on whether this translates into real differences in how people laugh/perceive laughter
Sophie Scott	UCL	Investigating the perception of laughter from video footage
Details Investigating the perception of laughter from video footage Especially suitable for Social Cognition students
Sophie Scott	ICN	Investigating the roles of sound and morphemes in word processing	in collaboration with Karalyn Patterson at Cambridge
Details Looking at the kinds of information people use when deciding if a word is a real word or not
David Shanks	UCL	Does sleep aid memory consolidation?
Details There is much evidence that sleep aids memory consolidation but this research is the subject of ongoing controversy. This project will adapt a procedure devised by Mazza et al. (2016) to provide a strong test of the sleep consolidation hypothesis. Mazza, S., Gerbier, E., Gustin, M.-P., Kasikci, Z., Koenig, O., Toppino, T. C., & Magnin, M. (2016). Relearn faster and retain longer: Along with practice, sleep makes perfect. Psychological Science, 27, 1321–1330.
David Shanks	UCL	Incidental anchoring: A preregistered replication.
Details Famously, Tversky and Kahneman (1974) showed that decision makers bias their estimates of unknown quantities in the direction of a salient numerical anchor. Standard anchoring paradigms have been shown to yield pervasive biases, such as a 2-step task which includes a comparative question followed by an estimation question. In contrast there is much less evidence for the claim that incidental environmental anchors can produce assimilative effects on judgments, such as the amount people are willing to pay for a meal being greater at a restaurant called Studio 97 compared to one called Studio 17. This project will involve setting up a large-sample preregistered replication of the incidental environmental anchoring study by Critcher and Gilovich (2008). Critcher, C. R., & Gilovich, T. (2008). Incidental environmental anchors. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 21, 241-251.
David Shanks & Simone Malejka	UCL	Can we learn something about visual contexts without being aware that we are learning?	1 project listed
Details This project will address the question of whether people can detect regularities in their environment and adapt their behaviour accordingly in the absence of awareness (consciousness). The contextual cuing effect shows that search times for targets hidden amongst distractors are faster when the same search displays are repeated compared to when they are randomly drawn anew. Although the effect is undebatable, it remains an open question whether participants are able to consciously recognise the repeated search displays. Vadillo, Konstantinidis, and Shanks (2016) recently suggested that this line of research suffers from a high probability of false-negative results on the recognition (awareness) test as well as from misinterpreting weak relationships between search times and recognition performance. Colagiuri and Livesey (2016) increased the sample size and argued that the data still support the absence of a positive relationship between search times and recognition performance. However, they ignored the problem that the measures’ unreliability will bias the relationship between them. In a new study, we will collect data that allow us to calculate reliability indices and test whether the absence of a positive relationship persists. Colagiuri, B., & Livesey, E. J. (2016). Contextual cuing as a form of nonconscious learning: Theoretical and empirical analysis in large and very large samples. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23, 1996–2009. Vadillo, M. A., Konstantinidis, E., & Shanks, D. R. (2016). Underpowered samples, false negatives, and unconscious learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23, 87–102.
David Shanks & Simone Malejka	UCL	Can we remember the source of information without remembering the information itself?	2 projects listed
Details Project 1: This project will tackle the question of whether there can be source memory in the absence of item memory. In a recent study, Malejka and Bröder (2016) showed that source memory for unrecognized items is most likely an artefact of implicit feedback. When the source question follows all OLD responses and NEW responses to old items (conditional test; Starns et al., 2008), participants know when a NEW response is incorrect and can make a correct source judgment. Malejka and Bröder (2016) asked the source question after every item response and thus no feedback was provided (unconditional test). Although the apparent effect of source memory for unrecognized items disappeared, it remains debatable whether participants in the latter task are motivated enough to provide source judgments to items they think are new. Only when new items have a source will responses to all questions actually be meaningful. In a new study, we will design new items that have a source, which should increase participants’ motivation to provide source judgments after responding NEW. Malejka, S., & Bröder, A. (2016). No source memory for unrecognized items when implicit feedback is avoided. Memory & Cognition, 44, 63–72. Starns, J. J., Hicks, J. L., Brown, N. L., & Martin, B. A. (2008). Source memory for unrecognized items: Predictions from multivariate signal detection theory. Memory & Cognition, 36, 1–8. Project 2: This project will address the question of whether there can be source memory in the absence of item memory. In a recent study, Chen, Gomes, and Brainerd (in press) showed that people can apparently remember the list an item appeared in without remembering that they have seen the item before. In the study phase, items studied on two different lists (e.g., List 1: apple, orange, banana, horse; List 2: dog, cat, mouse, strawberry) were either consistent with the list’s taxonomic category (e.g., apple in a list of fruits) or inconsistent (e.g., horse in a list of fruits). In the test phase, source memory for the list was better but item memory was worse when the tested item’s category was consistent with other words from the list. However, participants in Chen et al.’s (in press) experiments were well aware of the different categories, such that classifying an item they mistakenly think is new as originating from the list that included many words from that category is simply a rational response bias. In a new study, we will test whether the finding stands or falls with participants’ response bias by using other source details than taxonomic categories. Chen, X. R., Gomes, C. F. A., & Brainerd, C. J. (in press). Explaining recollection without remembering. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
Tali Sharot	UCL	Information Seeking and Psychopathology
Details Information Seeking and Psychopathology How do people decide what they want to know? And do those decisions give us clues about people’s mental health? The current project aims to investigate whether information-seeking paterns predict latent psychopathology conditions and affective states. For related work please read our previous paper on this topic http://affectivebrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Valuation-of-knowledge-and-ignorance.pdf Primary supervisor: Professor Tali Sharot Contact: Joseph Marks joseph.marks.14@ucl.ac.uk Student suitability Priority will be given to students who have: 1. Background in cognitive science, neuroeconomics, decision-making or social/cognitive/affective neuroscience 2. Experience programming in Matlab (or other programming languages), computational modeling About the Affective Brain Lab The Affective Brain Lab investigates how affect (the experience of emotion) affects human cognition and behaviour in normal brain function and in affective disorders (such as depression and anxiety). We study how motivation and emotion (generated in response to an internal thought, external reward and punishment, or social interaction) determine our expectations of the future, our everyday decisions, our memories and our ability to learn. By understanding these basic processes we aim to identify ways to encourage behavioural change that enhance well-being. Our approach is multidisciplinary; We tackle questions traditionally studied by social psychologists and behavioural economists utilizing brain imaging (fMRI), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), pharmacological manipulations, neuropsychiatric methods, computational models, genetics techniques, and behavioural experiments. We collaborate with psychologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists and behavioural economists worldwide. Our aim is to offer new insight into brain function in both health and disease. The practical implications are considerable, including policy formulation to correct for human biases as well as clinical applications in the treatment of brain dysfunction. For more information about the lab, please visit http://affectivebrain.com/
Elizabeth Simes supported by Professor Peter Fonagy		The impact of the peer researcher approach on a randomised control trial in the criminal justice system
Details Research interest: Patient and Public Involvement (PPI), peer researchers, antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), qualitative data collection, male offenders, and the criminal justice system. Project supervised by Elizabeth Simes (UCL) supported by Professor Peter Fonagy (UCL). Department: Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology (CEHP) Background to the study: Violent crime is associated with a range of negative impacts on health and wider society, and ASPD is a key contributor to violent criminal behaviour. ASPD is significantly overrepresented among offenders and it carries high rates of comorbidity and mortality for individuals, and high risk of harm to the public. The Mentalization for Offending Adult Males (MOAM) trial aims to explore the effectiveness of Mentalization-Based Treatment in reducing aggressive behaviour for offenders with ASPD through a randomised control trial in the national probation service. The trial is funded by the National Institute for Health Research and led by Professor Peter Fonagy at UCL. The study launched in January 2016 and is due to report in December 2020. It is well documented that the target population for the MOAM trial are hard to reach and often find it difficult to engage with services. The research team therefore decided to adopt the peer researcher approach involving researchers with lived experience of the criminal justice system as it was believed they would be able to access participants and topics that traditional research and service staff may not be able to reach. The peer researchers are currently collecting data for the trial and have been recruited through User Voice (http://www.uservoice.org/) a third sector ex-offender organisation who aim to reduce re-offending through research and engagement work which is led and delivered by ex-offenders. The inclusion of researchers with lived experience of the criminal justice system in data collection for a large-scale randomised control trial is new ground for the research team. To date the trial has managed to retain a very high number of participants, and only 2% of the population have dropped out of the study. We have also successfully exceeded our recruitment target. However, there have been other challenges with ensuring peer researchers are adequately trained and supported when meeting with participants in forensic settings. This study aims to capture learning and explore the impact of the peer researcher approach on the MOAM trial from the view point of the participants, operational staff and the peer researchers themselves. Research questions: To examine the impact of the peer researcher approach on the MOAM trial in four key areas 1. The peer researchers’ experience of collecting data in the criminal justice system. 2. The MOAM participants' experience of interacting and disclosing personal information to a peer researcher. 3. Explore the similarities and differences of the peer researcher approach compared to a participant’s experience of meeting with a traditional research assistant. 4. The impact of the involvement of peer researchers on the wider criminal justice system. Data collection: Data will be collected from autumn 2018 – summer 2019. The participants are men who meet threshold for ASPD currently under supervision of the national probation service in 13 sites in England and Wales and recruited into the MOAM trial (N=20); offender managers currently supervising the male offenders in 13 sites in England and Wales (N=20); male and female peer researchers currently collecting data for the MOAM trial (N=4) and User Voice operational staff (N=4). Data collection will involve completing semi-structured interviews exploring the interviewee’s experience of the peer researcher approach. Elizabeth is doing the project for her Research PhD and the MSc students will share data collection with her. The MSc student will be able to choose which aspects of the project they write up. Elizabeth is a Trial Coordinator based in the CEHP department and coordinates the MOAM trial. Elizabeth will supervise the day to day data collection for the project supported by Professor Peter Fonagy.
Jeremy Skipper & Abbas Haydari	UCL	Sensory substitution of speech perception through eye and mouth.
Details We are building a device to supplant hearing through the electrotactile stimulation of the mouth. This device is multisensory in that it relies on the interconnectedness of sensory modalities in the brain. Specifically, somatosensory and visual brain systems are known to play an integrated and inseparable role in normal speech perception. We will, therefore, evaluate the ability of participants to ‘hear’ speech sounds presented to an electrode array mounted in the mouth (making use of the somatosensory system) while simultaneously seeing a talker producing that speech (making use of the visual system). Can participants use these sensory systems to interface with typical auditory processing mechanisms to understand speech? We will begin to experimentally address this question by testing whether hearing participants experience the classic ‘McGurk-MacDonald effect’ with our device. This is an auditory perceptual illusion in which, under normal conditions, participants experience hearing, for example, a ‘ta’ when an auditory ‘pa’ is dubbed onto a visual ‘ka’. We will also test two different algorithms for presenting auditory information to the electrode array in the mouth. There is room for other projects. For example, we might train people to perceive speech on the device using auditorily and audiovisually presented sentences and test speed of learning and generalization to new sentences. If it works, the device might be of assistance to the 328 million adults worldwide who acquire disabling hearing loss. See http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/M026965/1 for some more details related to the device we are building.
Jeremy Skipper & Adam Harris	UCL	The effect of universities’ “explicit” and “implicit” environmental behaviours on adoption of pro-environmental behaviours by staff and students.
Details Many universities present themselves as being pro-environmental and ask staff and students to adopt eco-friendly behaviours, like recycling and taking the stairs, to do their part. Many of these same universities, however, invest heavily in fossil fuel companies and intermediaries that are a leading cause of environmental devastation and global warming (e.g., UCL invests about £21 million in these companies). Our recent research suggests that this discrepancy between universities explicit attitudes, e.g., as seen on websites, and their implicit attitudes toward the environment, e.g., as revealed by their investment strategies, negatively impact staff and students intentions to adoption of pro-environmental behaviours (www.lab-lab.org/research/green-ucl). We would like to extend this work by conducting further studies to experimentally test this hypothesis using measures of actual pro-environmental behaviours. Please email Jeremy Skipper (jskipper@lab-lab.org) for further details or to arrange an initial meeting. Supervisor: Dr Jeremy I Skipper (in collaboration with Adam Harris)
Jeremy Skipper and David Vinson	UCL	How much do nonverbal cues really contribute to language understanding?
Details How much do nonverbal cues really contribute to language understanding? (Co-supervisor: David Vinson) Speech is often accompanied by ‘nonverbal’ communicative cues. A long and rich history of behavioral research shows that we typically make use of those cues when they are available. For example, observable mouth movements, head movements, and co-speech gestures have all been individually shown to improve speech perception or language comprehension. What we do not know, however, is whether, when and how listeners use each of those cues when they are all simultaneously available (as they would be in natural face-to-face situations). To begin to address this question we will test the hypothesis that the contribution of nonverbal cues to understanding is a weighted function of the prior semantic informativeness of the speech signal and individual nonverbal cues themselves. For example, one could imagine that a co-speech gesture might contribute more to our momentary understanding than a speech-associated mouth movement when that gesture is iconic (versus a less semantically informative gesture) and when it begins well in advance of the word(s) described by that gesture (as in natural speech). In this project we will develop a new method to analyse video for the informativeness of different nonverbal cues. We might have participants verbally shadow a recorded television game show that contains natural dialogue and nonverbal cues. We can present the video intact or blur out individual nonverbal cues with the expectation that shadowing times should change as a function of the informativeness of each channel, allowing us to reconstruct the dynamic contribution of any one channel with respect to the intact video. Alternatively, we might develop metrics for measuring informativeness of nonverbal cues in video in a similar manner but with continuous ratings using a joystick.
Samuel Solomon	UCL	Instinctive visual decisions in mice
Details Supervisor name: Dr Samuel Solomon Affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology Email: s.solomon@ucl.ac.uk Website: http://solomonlab.info Project Title: Instinctive visual decisions in mice Project Details: Our laboratory aims to understand how neurons in the visual pathway provide information that can be used to guide rapid action. Our work focuses on mice, using techniques that include multi-electrode recordings and imaging in combination with innate and learned visually-guided behaviours. The proposed project below indicates the line of work we are interested in studying with MSc CoDeS students. We are happy to discuss alternative behavioural projects along similar lines. Depending on capacity and interest, the student may also participate in parallel electrophysiological recordings from key areas of the mouse brain.In the example project the student will establish how mice decide where to seek refuge during potential threat. This would involve video-tracking of mouse movements in custom-made open environments, during and after presentation of overhead visual stimuli. The first question is if mice use the location of sudden overhead threats to direct their choice of escape direction. The second question is if prior cueing of mice to the likely location of overhead threats improves their decision-making.These projects require some computational skill (the analyses are primarily in Matlab) and prior computational experience would be beneficial. The results of these experiments will inform us of whether mice naturally use vision to instruct decisions, and guide experiments in to understanding the neural mechanisms that allow this.
Maarten Speekenbrink	UCL	Multiple systems models of category and/or reinforcement learning
Details While multiple systems models are popular in cognition, there is still a lot of debate about the merits of such models compared to single systems models. An influential theory on category learning proposes a competition between a rule-based (explicit, verbal) system, and a similarity-based (implicit, procedural) system. Most of the evidence for such a view rests on comparing performance between different tasks in which the underlying category structure either conforms to a simple rule or not. While the results are compatible with the existence of multiple category learning systems, an important prediction remains untested, namely that people switch between relying mainly on one or the other system. The objective of this project is to test this hypothesis by gradually shifting the underlying category structure from a rule-based to a non-rule based representation, and back again. This will allow us to assess (1) whether one person can indeed switch between different systems, and (2) whether there is evidence of hysteresis, one of the key “flags” for the existence of qualitatively different, competing systems. Potentially, we could extend this paradigm to the reinforcement learning domain, Initial readings: Ell, S.W., & Ashby, F.G. (2006). The effects of category overlap on information-integration and rule-based category learning. Perception & Psychophysics, 68, 1013-1026. Visser, I., & Speekenbrink, M. (2014). It's a Catastrophe! Testing dynamics between competing cognitive states using mixture and hidden Markov models. Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Maarten Speekenbrink	UCL	Opponent learning in strategic games.
Details In interpersonal games, such as poker, we can learn about the strategies of our opponents and match our behaviour accordingly. Traditionally, game theory has ignored such learning or opponent modelling. Allowing for learning in games can potentially make strategic behaviour more complex, as you actions will not only affect who wins the game, but also how much your opponent(s) can learn about you strategy. The objective of this project is to investigate whether and how people learn the strategies of their opponents in simple repeated games with either simulated (computer) opponents, or real opponents. Initial readings: Camerer, C. F., & Ho, T. H. (2015). Behavioral game theory, experiments and modeling. Handbook of game theory, 4, 517-574. Erev, I. & Roth, A.E. (1998) Predicting how people play games: Reinforcement learning in strategic games. American Economic Review, 88, 848-881.
Maarten Speekenbrink	UCL	Topics in (reinforcement) learning and decision making
Details My research interests include learning and decision making, particularly in changing and dynamic environments. How do people learn to adapt their decision-making strategies to changing demands and preferences? How do we select the sources of information to consult in order to support our decision making? How do we integrate different sources of information in our decision making? In my lab, we use a combination of behavioural experiments and computational modelling to answer these questions. You can find more information and some background reading at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/speekenbrink-lab/. I'm generally happy to supervise interesting projects related to these issues, so if you have a good idea, we can discuss this.
Hugo Spiers	UCL	Understanding human planning abilities studying London taxi drivers
Details Navigation, the ability to find ways to get from one place to another, is one of our oldest and most vital skills that humans possess. Even though GPS and technology have rapidly replaced a lot of route planning in a new and often complex environment, we still use our navigation skills on a daily base, especially when we need to get around in a familiar environment. In this context, London taxi drivers possess unique skills: Their knowledge of >25,000 streets and places in London enables them to plan complex routes between any two points purely based on their memory. In this project we intend to test this knowledge to see how the environment (e.g. street layout, street sizes, turns, etc.) affects route planning of taxi drivers. The experiment will include data collection on a tablet, as well as verbal data from short interviews with taxi drivers. We are looking for a motivated student, who will be involved in planning, data collection and data analysis in this project. Required skills: Basic Statistics (SPSS, Excel) and good communication skills are required. Additional skills that would be useful for this project, include some experience in interviewing and programming (Python, Matlab). Even though these skills are not a must, the willingness to acquire these skills is.
Sabine Topf and Maarten Speekenbrink	UCL	Stigmergic cooperation in the climate commons -- promoting individual pro-environmental behaviours
Details For pro-environmental behaviours to have a tangible impact, a single person’s engagement is not enough; rather, individuals need to coordinate their efforts. We are interested in how people coordinate, i.e. specifically how evidence of other people’s behaviour (so-called ‘behavioural traces’) influences individual behaviour. The effect of behavioural traces has been observed for littering behaviour (Cialdini et al., 1990, Study 1), donations (Jacobs et al., 2018), and the spread of solar panel use (Baranzini et al., 2017), amongst others. We use the theory of stigmergy (Heylighen, 2016) to test specific aspects of behavioural traces and their impact on individual pro-environmental behaviours. So far we have looked at effects of stigmergic coordination for donation and recycling behaviours as well as designed a computer game that emulates small world climate change based on game theory. Projects in any of these and related areas are welcome. Initial readings: Heylighen, F. (2016). Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism I: Definition and components. Cognitive Systems Research, 38, 50–59.
David Tuckett	UCL	Conviction Narrative Theory and its Applications
Details Conviction narrative theory (CNT) is a new framework being developed at UCL to expand psychological understanding and research to decision-making in radical uncertainty. Several projects are available - their common theme is that they look at the facilitating role of emotion and narratives and/or that they explore uncertainty - i.e. looking at experimental situations where the subject does not have a 'correct'answer. Some of the work looks at how to measure emotion in narratives and can be applied to risk detection or efforts to forecast the economy. These projects will often be run jointly with Dr David Vinson) Institute for Multimodal Communication) , Dr Rickard Nyman (Computer Science), or Dr Sam Johnson (Cognitive science).
Jyrki Tuomainen	UCL	Cross-modal masked repetition priming, attention and brain correlates (ERPs)
Details see the attached file for more details. The student is expected to participate in designing the experiment (e.g. stimulus selection), and, as a bonus, will learn the event-related potential technique.
Jyrki Tuomainen	UCL	The role of perceptual load in audiovisual speech integration
Details The role of perceptual load in audiovisual speech integration: A behavioural and event-related potential study It has been convincingly established that top-down effects, such as perceptual set (Tuomainen et al. 2005, Eskelund et al. 2013) and visual selective attention (e.g. Alsius & Navarra, 2011) affect integration of seen and heard speech. These results suggest that attention is a necessary condition for successful audio-visual speech integration. Less is known about the mechanisms how selective attention affects the integration process. One options is that perceptual load (Lavie & Tsal, 1995) modulates the employment of attentional resources. We suggest a project in which the level of perceptual load is manipulated while participants are engaged in a (modified) visual flanker task, and the integration process is measured using the well-known McGurk paradigm. We assume that if perceptual load modulates the interaction process then participants will be less susceptible to the McGurk illusion in the high load condition compared to the low load condition. The potential underlying mechanism would involve a reduction in attentional resources to process the mouth movements (the distractor) which in turn will hamper the integration of visual and auditory speech information. We will collect both behavioural and event-related brain potential (ERP) data. The student would be involved in designing the details of the study (especially the ERPs) and will be mainly responsible for collecting and analysing the data. This project is supervised by Jyrki Tuomainen (Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences/UCL).
Gabriella Vigliocco	UCL	Learning and using language in the real-world	There are four projects listed here!
Details Projects’ list: Prof Gabriella Vigliocco Experimental Psychology, g.vigliocco@ucl.ac.uk This is a list of projects available in my laboratory for M-level students. Please note that if you work with me, you will be expected to contribute to the life of the lab, including attending weekly lab meetings -- a great opportunity to learn about other research going on and for presenting your work. Working on any of the projects you will contribute to all aspects of design, testing, analysis and writing up. Overview Much of the current research in the lab concentrates on the non-linguistic (often imagistic) information provided by speakers in face-to-face communication, its role in language learning and comprehension and its neural underpinning. This non-linguistic information includes the gestures produced (especially iconic gestures), the intonation (prosody), the use of vocalizations (eg. onomatopoeia) and also the mouth movements that accompany speech. This information is always present in face-to-face communication. However, traditionally it has been largely ignored. But then, why are these features always present in face-to-face communication? Our proposal is that this information is critical in learning and that it also supports online comprehension (see Perniss & Vigliocco, 2014 for overview). The projects listed below address the following questions: (1) does the non-linguistic information support learning new words and, critically, new concepts in childhood and adulthood? (2) Does it (and to what extent) support language comprehension? (3) How is it processed in the brain? Projects 1&2: Learning new words and concepts in childhood and adulthood Learning new concepts and their labels has been characterised as a hard problem because the label (the object’s name) is argued to be only arbitrarily linked to the object; and because there usually are multiple objects in the visual scene. The problem is, clearly, even harder when the object is not in view. While a number of cues (e.g., shared attention) have been proposed to help children (2-4) learn new objects and labels, very little work has addressed this question for adults. In our work, we have made the novel hypothesis that the multimodal cues available in communication, such as gestures, prosody and onomatopoeias can support learning because they can imagistically bring to mind’s eye features of referents. One completely open question is to what extent these cues are present both in communication with children and adults. Projects 1&2 will use a semi-naturalistic approach and compare interactions between caregiver-child and adult-adult to assess whether/how speakers adjust their language, gestures and prosody depending upon whether the person they are talking to (child or adult) can interact with the objects being labelled or not, and whether the object and the label are novel or not. Project 1 will focus on manual cues such as gestures, but also manipulation of objects; Project 2 will focus on the speech used and the use of prosodic modulation. Project 3: The role of gesture and prosody in learning new words in childhood In Project 3 we will experimentally test whether iconicity (i.e., an imagistic relation between properties of the communication - gestures, prosody – and properties of the referents) facilitates word learning in 2-3 years old children. We compare situations where the referent is visible to the child when the label is produced, to situations where the referent is no longer visible. The experiment will take place in nurseries around London. Students will gain experience designing stimuli, running online experiments using the Gorilla platform, and working with young children (age 2-3 years). Project 4: The role of multimodal cues in real-world spoken comprehension Language is learnt and mostly used in face-to-face contexts where prosody is used to mark new topics of conversation, visible mouth movements can be used to disambiguate the speech, and hand gestures can provide useful information about the meaning of what is being said. However, language studies for the most focus on speech or text only. Moreover, while a few studies have looked at non-linguistic cues such prosody or gesture in isolation, we know virtually nothing about how the brain orchestrate the processing of these multiple cues, especially in real-world interactions. Using EEG, we will investigate how neural responses to complex naturalistic language stimuli are modulated by linguistic context, prosody, mouth movements, and hand gestures. In the project, you will learn about how to use computational modelling to derive probabilistic measures of predictability of words in context; prepare audio-visual materials engaging professional actors; use software for segmentation and prosodic analysis, programme and perform the EEG experiment; analyse the rich multimodal data and write up the report.
David Vinson	UCL	Researchers tested how emotive language influences our opinions. What they found will blow your mind!!! :O
Details Online news articles have increasingly been used as a data source to study how people express emotion and form opinions. Recent events, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal have shed some light onto how people can be influenced by what they read online. In this project we will examine how emotive language expressed in online news articles is interpreted, and the extent to which such language influences people’s opinions. In this project the student will run online studies asking participants to read and evaluate selected news articles. For each article, study participants will be asked to identify the entities mentioned in the article that may be ‘influenced’ by what is said in the article, and subsequently rate how strongly the author and reader of the article feels towards the entity. Possible questions that we might wish to answer is how a reader’s prior beliefs impact their emotional response to the article and the entity, whether the effects vary across different article topics/types (politics, finance, etc.), or whether people can separate their own emotional response from the emotion expressed by the article’s author. Basic knowledge of statistics and programming in Python are required; The project will involve large datasets (i.e ‘big data’), so experience with databases such as SQL/MongoDB are a plus, though not essential. Background in linguistics is not required, although a project could take a more linguistic focus depending on student interest/expertise. Please email David Vinson (d.vinson@ucl.ac.uk) for further details or to arrange an initial meeting. In collaboration with Prof David Tuckett
Sarah White	UCL	Measuring implicit mentalizing through eye-tracking
Details Measuring implicit mentalizing through eye-tracking Mentalizing is the ability to represent another person’s mental states (thoughts, beliefs, desires etc.) as distinct from one’s own mental states. Explicit measures of mentalizing have been used for over 30 years and tend to involve verbal responses justifying people’s actions or explaining what they were thinking (e.g. Baron-Cohen et al., 1985; Happé, 1994). More recently, implicit measures of mentalizing have been developed (e.g. Senju et al., 2009), although these methods have also been criticized in the literature (e.g. Heyes, 2014). In this project, you will develop an existing eye-tracking measure of implicit mentalizing to address methodological criticisms, as well as trialing a novel eye-tracking measure of implicit mentalizing. This project will involve creating video stimuli, programming the task, testing typical adults, processing and analysis of the data, and writing up the final results. Project supervisor: Sarah White Senior Research Fellow Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL 17 Queen Square 020 7679 1168 s.white@ucl.ac.uk www.minifish.net
Geert-Jan Will	UCL	Neural and Computational Processes Underlying Changes in Self-Esteem
Details Project title: 'Neural and Computational Processes Underlying Changes in Self-Esteem' Supervisor: Dr. Geert-Jan Will (Research group: Prof. Ray Dolan) Background: Low self-esteem is a core characteristic of many psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and depression. Yet, the neural and computational processes mediating changes in self-esteem are largely unknown. Using computational modeling, my colleagues and I have recently shown that moment-to-moment fluctuations in self-esteem can be explained by the combined influence of: 1) recent expectations about what other people think about us and 2) social prediction errors arising from those expectations when we receive feedback from them (i.e. the difference between actual and expected social feedback). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we showed that social prediction errors correlate with activity in the ventral striatum and momentary changes in self-esteem co-vary with activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Next steps (this is where you get involved!): I am looking for MSc students who would like to help me further expand this line of research. I am planning three new projects (1 functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging [fMRI] study, 1 large-scale behavioral study, and 1 drug administration study), which will provide unique insights into the dynamics underlying changes in self-esteem. Research questions will include: 1. Can we predict who will develop depressive symptoms in a sample of young people at risk for depression using neuroimaging and our self-esteem task? 2. How do social comparisons affect changes in self-esteem? 3. What is the role of dopamine in social feedback processing and changes in self-esteem? I am looking for students who have: - Enthusiasm for social, cognitive and/or clinical neuroscience. - Great organizational, interpersonal, and communication skills. - Experience with software used for statistical analysis and experimental design (e.g., SPSS, R, MATLAB). - Prior experience running human subjects (having worked with vulnerable populations like patients or children is preferred). Your responsibilities will include: - Participant recruitment, screening, and testing. - Analysis of behavioral and/or fMRI data. - Assistance in further development of the research. Contact details: If you are interested, please send an email with your CV to: Dr. Geert-Jan Will (g.j.will@ucl.ac.uk).
Michelle Wilson	UCL	Self criticism and self compassion in trainee clinical psychologists	Project to explore levels of self criticism and self compassion within trainee clinical psychologists currently enrolled on clinical psychology training programmes
Details Project to explore levels of self criticism and self compassion within trainee clinical psychologists currently enrolled on clinical psychology training programmes

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MSc research project proposal 
November 2015

Developing an online Alzheimer’s risk reduction intervention using the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW).


The BCW essentially covers the full range of intervention functions such as education; persuasion and training that are likely to be effective in areas eliciting change in specific lifestyle target behaviours. These intervention functions can be further broken down into specific behaviour change techniques (BCTs) using the BCT taxonomy: BCTT (V1) (Michie et al., 2011), which provides an extensive list of evidence, based BCTs. Once the model defines the behaviour to be changed, the COM-B model (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation- Behaviour) within the BCW is used in order to identify what needs to be changed and therefore develop the intervention accordingly. The intervention will be tailored to individual needs as it currently is and therefore it will include or make use of different features and levels within the model. E.g. the intervention will be linked with individual levels of motivation and therefore will give specific feedback based on individual preferences, “the 6 prevention steps”. 

Preliminary field work will take place and therefore for this project information from two sources will be combined: 1) an analysis of the current dataset; 2) a survey for people who have completed the CFT in the last year and semi-structured interviews and focus groups with people who have completed the CFT and lifestyle questionnaire in the last year.

We will systematically make use of the available evidence in relation to eHealth for dementia, the effect of nutrition in dementia risk, plus evidence in relation to the effects of awareness in relation to  the link between healthy brain and body. This information will be combined with the use of the BCW framework to identify what theoretical domains need to be targeted to change risks and how these should be targeted (e.g., interactive features of the intervention, use of webseminars linked to behaviour change techniques). This model has been implemented successfully in other health promotion areas such as sexual health, obesity, mental health and general health in third world countries (Michie et al., 2014). A clear BCW manual, online training and guidelines are currently available for its implementation (Michie et al., 2011, 2014) and will be followed in order to redefine the intervention, CFT5. 

The intervention development based on the BCW will follow three stages: (1) Understanding the problem and user preferences through data analysis and qualitative surveys and interviews; (2) Translating research findings into intervention application features (eg. Webseminars); and, (3) Pre-testing the online features for further refinement (Figure 1). 
 
Figure 1 eHealth intervention development process by Kurtis et al., 2014

This project is based within the department of clinical, educational and health psychology and supervised by HCPC registered Health Psychologist.  It would suit a hard working, independent student with a strong interest health psychology and behavior change.


For more information, please contact: Dr Georgina Charlesworth and Dr Elisa Aguirre  by email: g.charlesworth@ucl.ac.uk, e.aguirre@ucl.ac.uk

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Investigating British sign language skills in a deaf signer with visuospatial and face processing impairments 		 			

Prerequisites: 
Essential - fluent sign language skills 		 			
Desirable (but not essential)- psychology or speech and language background 		 			
Ethical approval already obtained 		 			

This study involves collecting and analysing single case study data from a deaf participant with rare neurological damage involving the right temporal lobes, using tests of visuospatial ability, face recognition, and spatial and facial aspects of BSL (prepositions, classifiers, locatives etc). Right temporal lobe damage spares language function in spoken language but has subtle but serious consequences for the use of British Sign Language. The study aims  to document the impact of right temporal damage for sign language, revealing hitherto little explored relations between the right hemisphere; spatial cognition; face processing -  and language. This work is exciting because no one has documented a similar case in a deaf signer before, and the study of sign language allows phenomena to emerge that would be missed if research was only limited to spoken languages.

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Collective decision making  

Collective decision making describe the process in which a group of individuals interact and reach a decision, a process which take place in everyday life, as well as in crucial decision points in the lives of individuals and groups. We study this subjects by examining dyads (pairs of subjects) while making joint decisions regarding perceptual tasks. An emerging notion is the importance of metacognition, i.e. our ability to asses our own performance and communicate them, to this process. Key questions are how dynamic are metacognition abilities, and how they affect dyads performance. Moreover, can these properties be linked to neuronal structure or pattern of neuronal activity, which may indicate the neural basis of human cooperation?   We are looking for a highly motivated student to take part in a project involving behavioural measurements of dyad decision making.  Required Skills: Basic Statistics (SPSS, Excel), programming in Matlab (or other programming language) is not a must but having some background (or eagerness to learn) it is going to be very useful. Background in computer science and cognitive psychology/neuroscience is preferable.   Required commitment: The project will require ~50 hours of data collection which will consist of ~30 sessions. In addition the task includes preparing the experiment (consent forms, experimental instructions, and running sheets), recruiting the participant pairs, running the experiments, backing up the data and participating in the analysis of the data.  Educational value: The experiment offers an opportunity to engage in design, programming and implementation of a behavioural experiment in social neuroscience, as well as introduction to data analysis tools and methods. The student will become familiar with basic analysis of structural brain imaging data. Help for learning and using Matlab will be provided.

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The aim of this project is to investigate the relationship between risk behaviour and type of causal information. Are people more willing to take risks when they know the causal mechanism behind a threat or when they know the frequency of the threat?

References:
Walsh, C. R., & Sloman, S. A. (2011). The meaning of cause and prevent: The role of causal mechanism. Mind & Language, 26(1), 21-52.
Sloman, S. A., & Lagnado, D. (2015). Causality in thought. Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 223-247.
Chicago

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The causal reordering effect (Bechlivanidis & Lagnado, 2013) is a recently discovered illusion in which events that are thought to be causally related are perceived to occur in the order suggested by their causal relationship even if that order conflicts with the objective temporal order. 
Imagine for example that your friend is holding a glass of water that suddenly slips through his hand and starts falling to the floor. While you are following the glass with your gaze and half a second before it reaches the ground, it shatters to pieces.  Recent research indicates that you will in fact perceive the shattering after the glass collides with the floor. In other words, people seem to impose at the perceptual level the temporal priority principle of causal relationships: effects can never precede their causes. 
The following proposals aim to further elucidate the effect, the exact conditions in which it arises and the theoretical and practical implications. Any further ideas about projects examining the effect are very welcome.
1)	Is the reordering effect present only in sequences where objects are in motion? This would suggest that the effect occurs only in noisy perceptual environments. Devise a paradigm in which there are strong causal assumptions about non-moving objects to test whether the effect depends on perceptual noise.

2)	In the absence of stable causal knowledge, causal inference depends strongly on temporal order cues. Thus, if A occurs before B and we know that A and B are somehow correlated, temporal order is one of the major cues that is used to determine the causal direction, i.e. which is the cause and which is the effect. This well-known fact in combination with the causal reordering effect suggests a bidirectional relationship between causal and temporal order: we use temporal order to learn about causal relationships and we use causal knowledge to infer temporal order. Can we devise an experiment that will illustrate this bidirectionality?

3)	To what extent does the presence of alternative causal explanations reduce the causal reordering effect? In other words, if the (objective) temporal order in which events take place can be explained by the behaviour of another event, would people report the correct temporal order?

4)	What is the role of agency in the reordering effect? In the cases where I am causing the effect rather than passively observing it, will I perceive my action occurring before or after the effect? Compare the effect in purely observational vs. interventional contexts. See also (Rohde et al, 2014)

5) Is the effect present only in the visual domain? Would it work in the auditory domain too? i.e. do people reorder sounds according to their causal expectations?

Suggested Readings
Bechlivanidis, C., & Lagnado, D. A. (2013). Does the 'why' tell us the 'when'? Psychological science, 24(8), 1563-1572. doi: 10.1177/0956797613476046
Bechlivanidis, C., & Lagnado, D. A. (2016). Time reordered: Causal perception guides the interpretation of temporal order. Cognition, 146, 58-66.
Marieke Rohde, Meike Scheller, Marc O. Ernst (2014) Effects can precede their cause in the sense of agency, Neuropsychologia, http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.10.011

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Do explanations need to be simple or complex, general or concrete? Do everyday explanations share the same qualities as scientific explanations? Is understanding a necessary goal of explanations?
Some relevant reading:
Lombrozo, T. (2016). Explanatory Preferences Shape Learning and Inference. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(10), 748–759. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.08.001

Grimm, S. R. (2010). The goal of explanation. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 41(4), 337–344. http://doi.org/10.1016/J.SHPSA.2010.10.006

Bechlivanidis, C., Lagnado, D. A., Zemla, J. C., & Sloman, S. (2017). Concreteness and abstraction in everyday explanation. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1–14. http://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-017-1299-3

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Christos Bechlivanidis  & Anne Schlottmann, UCL Experimental Psychology
c.bechlivanidis@ucl.ac.uk, a.schlottmann@ucl.ac.uk,  

We share an interest in in causal reasoning and perception and would be happy to co-supervise students in this area,  either conducting online studies with adults or person-to-person studies with children. We have two current sets of projects:

1)	PERCEPTUAL CAUSALITY IN COMPLEX ENVIRONMENTS:  This line of work extends the approach pioneered in Michotte's famous studies of perceptual causality (Michotte, 1963). Michotte argued that sometimes, causality can be seen directly, and is essentially a Gestalt property of certain motion sequences. Michotte’s approach is so attractive because it explains how humans (including babies from birth) can be sensitive to simple forms of causality, when 2000 years of philosophy has not led to much agreement even on how to define the concept. Here we focus on the argument that perceptual causality could help us parse the event stream to determine the causal structure of our complex environment, without requiring much reasoning or problem-solving. This is an attractive claim, yet there are no data,  as virtually all studies involve only two objects moving on similar paths in otherwise empty space.  Here, we extend study to situations involving many moving objects on multiple trajectories, which is closer to the real world. In the simplest paradigm, we consider how causality judgments in such a complex world might differ (or not) from that in a two object environment. Another approach is to consider visual search for causality in such complex worlds, to explore whether perceptual causality confers advantages for attention.

2)	CAUSALITY IN UNREALISTIC EVENTS:  According to all relevant psychological theories,  we should only consider a perceived sequence of events as causal if it (more or less) conforms to what is real or at least possible.  Yet, this makes causal learning of genuinely new relations very difficult. It would also not seem to fit with our willingness to accept unrealistic forms of causality in movies or in magic shows, despite knowledge that this is not real-life causality. We have already done a series of studies showing that adults are very happy to treat various animated, unrealistic events (treated as non-causal in the Michotte literature) as causal on initial encounter – the events are re-evaluated and become non-causal only if there are repeated encounters that allow comparison to a more standard, realistic causal event,  but prior to such comparison people entertain a quite wide range of unrealistic causal hypotheses.  We would now like to extend the approach to look at people’s reaction to magic and to photo-realistic events “that should not be”.   This project requires students who are either magicians,  or who have very good video-editing skills, to produce the unrealistic events for testing.

3)	BOTH PROJECTS COULD ALSO BE ADAPTED FOR WORK WITH CHILDREN.

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The aim of the project is to examine the low level cues that generate coincidences. The working hypothesis is that the coincidence detection shares the same mechanism with causal learning, the discovery of true causal relationships in the environment. To test this hypothesis we would like to 'fabricate' coincidences in the lab or online.

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Supervisor: Daniel Bendor: d.bendor@ucl.ac.uk  
Departments:  Experimental Psychology 
Topic: Crowdsourcing 2.0: How can we better predict future outcomes through crowdsourcing  

Crowdsourcing has become an increasing popular method for evaluating products and services (e.g. Yelp and Tripadvisor). One limitation with these methods is that a large number of votes are required to get an accurate representation of the population.  The goal of this project is to develop a more efficient method of crowdsourcing, where the expertness of the evaluator is assessed, and used to weight the evaluation.  In other words, experts will have more influence on the results than novices.  We will run a series of experiments to evaluate whether objective measurements can be used to judge “expertness”, and whether reweighting evaluations based on this improves the accuracy of crowdsourcing.  We are looking for a highly motivated student to take part in this project involving data collection and analysis.  Required Skills: none.  Programming in Matlab and PHP (for webpage design) is preferable.

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Supervisors: Vincent Walsh and Marinella Cappelletti    
Topic: Learning in healthy ageing     

Idea summary:  Working memory and inhibitory skills are known for being very important in several everyday activities and cognitive tasks, and they are also known for declining with age.  The current project aims to study the effect of training on working memory and inhibitory skills, and the impact of any training-induced improvement on other cognitive abilities, such as attention, space especially number processing. We will be testing older healthy participants who will undergo intensive training based on an established paradigm. Half of the participants will also receive brain stimulation (transcranial direct current stimulation), whilst the other half of the participants will receive sham stimulation.  We will test the predictions that (1) people receiving brain stimulation and training may improve more than those receiving just training, and that (2) transfer to untrained but related skills may reflect the amount of improvement of working memory and inhibitory skills.     Required Skills:  Basic Statistics (SPSS, Excel); excellent organisational skills, previous experience in testing participants and programming in Matlab would be preferable.     Required commitment:  The task includes preparing the experiment (consent forms, experimental instructions, and running sheets), helping with recruiting the participants, running the experiments, backing up the data and participating in the analysis of the data.     Contact m.cappelletti@ucl.ac.uk

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Prediction in Native and Non-native Language Processing  

Much recent work suggests that generating predictions about the future is a fundamental principle underlying the brain’s operations. Our ability to anticipate upcoming input allows us to process language quickly and reliable, and some of the challenges faced by different speaker groups (e.g., first and second language learners) may be attributable to failures to engage predictive mechanisms. This project aims to examine whether and how knowledge of one’s native language affects predictive computations during second language (L2) processing. Are some of the common mistakes made by L2 speakers attributable to a lack of prediction or perhaps to “faulty” predictive algorithms? To what extent do L2 speakers rely on their first language (L1) grammatical knowledge to compute predictions when they process their L2?  Native (or near-native) proficiency in Spanish (or other Romance languages) is preferred but not required.

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It's estimated that one million people per year (and rising) are treated for their common mental health problems such as depression and anxiety in IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) services in England. After recovery patients are discharged and there is evidence that their symptoms can deteriorate particularly in the 6 months after discharge. Relapse following recovery from depression is common. For this reason we designed a novel intervention to add to depression treatment with the aim of preventing relapses. 

We have just completed a pilot trial (March 2018) of the PRotect intervention: a brief relapse prevention intervention for people who have recovered from depression in IAPT services. The intervention focusses on wellbeing and healthy habits, and was well received by participants and there is an indication it might help to prevent relapse. 

On completion of the trial we held a focus group to explore the experience of trial clinicians. The project offered for a Masters student would involve conducting a thematic analysis of the focus group transcript alongside myself, and co-authoring a publication. We will take a theory-driven approach to the analysis, using normalisation process theory to guide our assessment of whether the intervention could be implemented in IAPT services.

The transcript is ready and methods reasonably developed. The project is not likely to be delayed, so may be suited to students who have had disruption to their original project plans.

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I am broadly interested in the application of methods in psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science to the study of political decision making. My current research has a focus on the individual differences that might help to explain different attitudes towards immigration and inequality, and on the causes and consequences of political engagement. This year, I would be particularly interested in supervising projects on the following topics:

1) Testing whether psychological traits predict changes in voting behaviour in large political science databases. 

2) Testing whether people with differing political affiliations use different vocabulary on twitter. 

3) Testing whether people are biased to vote for politicians with facial characteristics that are perceived as more 'competent', using dynamic clips from election debates (this is a collaboration with the BBC). 

4) Using more advanced machine learning and clustering methods to understand whether there are different 'types' of voters, and whether those types have different psychological characteristics. 

In addition to these topics, I'm happy (keen in fact) to discuss ideas from students that apply ideas and methods in modern cognitive science to political psychology.

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Over the course of a normal day, children have to make countless risky perceptual-motor decisions, from when to cross a busy road, to where to aim when kicking a ball in a guarded goal. Movement decisions involve a complex interplay between perceptual, motor and “cost” variables. The best decisions maximise the chance of success, and can be equated formally to maximising gain in a lottery. In previous studies we have found that children make overly risky decisions that harmed their visuomotor task performance (e.g., Dekker & Nardini, 2015, Developmental Science).

To investigate when and how children learn to move their body in the safest and most efficient way possible, our group uses game-like computer tasks with touch screens, whole-body movement installations, virtual reality, and MRI. The measures are designed to emulate real-world problems we face when choosing safe courses of action during ‘movements under risk’, such as crossing a road or playing sports.

We welcome motivated MSc students with excellent organisation and communication skills, and with some affinity for Maths (as we fit “ideal actor models” to performance measures to quantify movement efficiency). We will provide very thorough training and support in all aspects of the MSc project, including subject recruitment, data collection and all aspects of data analysis.

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There is considerable converging evidence that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a role in integrating both conscious and subconscious information when making decisions.  For instance, it has been shown to be activated by brand (McClure et al 2004) and pricing information (Plassman et al 2007) when consumers evaluate whether or not to buy a product.  Moreover, non-invasive stimulation of the region reduced emotional influences on jury decision making when assigning punishments with guilty verdicts (Bucholz et al 2016).  This study will use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate the role of DLPFC during willingness-to-pay decision making in a simulated on-line shopping task.  Brand information is expected to enhance willingness-to-pay over unbranded items (i.e. a brand advantage).  The expectation is that TMS to DLPFC but not a control site, will reduce the advantage by interfering with the integration of the brand associations.  Both behavioural and eye tracking data will be collected.

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Designing a logo for a new company is more art than science, but it is based on psychological principles such as similarity and associations. The assumption is that a new logo needs to be consistent with the category of logos that it belongs to (e.g. family brands, luxury, etc). Feedback from focus groups is rarely accurate for logos because people often struggle to articulate what exactly they like/dislike about an image or how it fits or does not fit with their expectations. This project will explore the use of ERPs to provide empirical evidence of these factors from “neuro-focus groups.”  The ERPs will be used to evaluate perceived category membership for logos in comparison to clear-cut canonical categories often used in mismatch negativity studies. The results will reveal whether ERPs can successfully supplement traditional focus groups when evaluating the suitability of new logos.

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Traditional EEG systems use a montage of 32-256 electrodes arranged in a cap for data collection with the assumption being the more electrodes the better. This advantage is certainly present for spatial localisation and robustness but it comes at a cost – namely, the systems are more expensive and take a long time to set up per participant. Many ERP paradigms are fairly robust and do not require dipole localisation. In such cases, a high-density recording set-up may be unnecessary. This project will take a robust ERP paradigm such as an oddball paradigm and run participants on it using different EEG hardware systems, such as a typical high-density system, an Emotiv low-density system and a Muse 4-channel dry headband. The data will be compared to quantitatively evaluate robustness and sensitivity of the hardware when the sole goal is evaluating ERP waveforms (i.e. without topographic distribution or spatial localization). The results have important implications for interpreting results from different systems but also for practical data acquisition decisions.

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The study of reasoning on Bayesian word problems (such as the classic medical diagnosis and taxi cab problems) has a long history stretching back to at least Tversky and Kahneman (1983). The natural frequency / nested sets methods have proven to be the most effective in improving accuracy on classic problems, however recent work (Dewitt et al. under review) has suggested a way in which these approaches can be enhanced further, by combining them with a third approach. This has not been done before and would represent the first major improvement in accuracy in the field for 20 years.

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Research on collective decision-making has mainly focused on whether they are better or worse than individual decisions. An important and less explored question is why individuals engage in collective decisions in the first place. The project here investigates one particular motive for individuals joining collectives: reducing the consequences of negative outcomes. In a behavioural task, participants will be given the possibility to voluntarily choose if they want to engage in individual or collective decisions in different contexts: decisions with reward (win), punishment (lose) or neutral. The experiment aims to provide a link between collective decisions and punishment aversion, by testing the prediction that participants will prefer to collaborate with others more often for decisions with aversive outcomes.

The MSc student will code, run and analyse the behavioural experiment. 
Required skills:
-Basic statistics
-Programming using Matlab (or other programming softwares) is preferable

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I am a Post Doctoral Researcher at the ICN and would like to inform you about a project I am currently running along with Dr Antonia Hamilton and Dr Anna Ciaunica on the relationship between high frequency depersonalisation (DP) experiences and the sensorimotor processing of self and other's. DP is an altered form of consciousness which typically manifests as a disruption of bodily self-awareness. People experiencing DP report feelings of being “estranged”, cut-off from oneself and surroundings and often talk about “being in a bubble”, or being separated from the physical and social world by “an invisible barrier such as a pane of glass, a fog, or a veil” which when chronic can induce a persistent and highly disturbing sense of alienation known as depersonalisation disorder (DPD). 

Our project presented explores the relationship between the experience of DP and sensorimotor processing of self and other. We are currently investigating, in two studies, the differences in sensorimotor processing between healthy participants who have either a high or low trait occurrence of DP experiences. In the first experiment we investigate how trait DP affects the integration of visual and tactile sensory signal Visual Remapping of Touch (VRT) paradigm. In the second we will investigate how high trait DP affects sensorimotor mirroring using a facial mimicry paradigm.

As well as having an interesting clinical aspect in helping to understand the at present poorly understood phenomena of DP the project will give you a chance to learn about how to prepare stimuli for individual participants, how to conduct psychophysiological experiments using tactile stimulation and EMG recording and how to analyse and present that data. If you are interested in taking this project on for your MSc dissertation please contact me at h.farmer@ucl.a.uk and we can meet and discuss the work.

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EMDR protocols are standardised and an increasing amount of research studies suggest that EMDR is effective in treating anxiety, pain, and fear. This renders the possibility to develop an automated EMDR protocol, in the form of an online intervention, which patients can use for self help. 
This project involves recruiting participants and evaluating the effectiveness and/or user experience of an online intervention. It would be of interest for anyone looking to learn more about eHealth, behavioural health tech, and the use of psychotherapy methods to bring about behavioural change. 
Project aim is to design an effective online intervention using evidence based methodologies from psychotherapy. This project contributes to the goal by (i) generating initial data on how users interact with online applications in the context, and (ii) developing a framework for testing and evaluating the effectiveness and user friendliness of such applications.

Valiente-Gómez A, Moreno-Alcázar A, Treen D, Cedrón C, Colom F, Pérez V and Amann BL (2017) EMDR beyond PTSD: A Systematic Literature Review. Front. Psychol. 8:1668. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01668

Ebert, D. D., Zarski, A. C., Christensen, H., Stikkelbroek, Y., Cuijpers, P., Berking, M., & Riper, H. (2015). Internet and computer-based cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety and depression in youth: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled outcome trials. PLoS ONE, 10(3), 1–15. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0119895

De Jongh, A., Ten Broeke, E., & Renssen, M. . (1999). Treatment of Specific Phobias with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 13(1–2), 69–85. http://doi.org/10.1016/S0887-6185(98)00040-1

Markus, W., & Hornsveld, H. (2017). EMDR Interventions in Addiction. Journal of EMDR Practice and Research, 11(1), 3–29. http://doi.org/10.1891/1933-3196.11.1.3

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Please see attached Word document for details

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Variations in visual perception
John Greenwood
Email: john.greenwood@ucl.ac.uk
Lab website: http://eccentricvision.com

Our lab examines visual perception, using the techniques of visual psychophysics in order to understand the way that we see the world. I have suggested two projects, but feel free to contact me if you have other interests or ideas. Both projects below will involve a series of behavioural experiments using psychophysical techniques. You will acquire skills in experiment design, programming (in MATLAB), psychophysical testing, and data analysis. Programming experience is a plus but not required in advance.

Project 1: Visual crowding in dyslexia

In our visual field, objects are easy to see when we look directly at them and difficult to see in peripheral vision. This is not simply to do with visual resolution – even when a target object is large enough to be seen in isolation, the placement of other objects nearby can make the target become difficult to recognise. This process, known as crowding, is a fundamental bottleneck for visual perception. Crowding has also been argued to be elevated in the central vision of people with dyslexia. These elevations have been found via letter-identification tasks, though evidence with other tasks (e.g. the orientation of line elements) is mixed. We suspect that dyslexic crowding is specific to letters and that other visual domains are unaffected – you could test this by directly comparing the crowding of letter stimuli with those for simpler visual tasks (like line orientation). The project will also touch on broader issues regarding whether crowding is a singular process or a family of independent feature-level processes.

Relevant publications:
-Whitney, D, & Levi, DM. (2011). Visual crowding: A fundamental limit on conscious perception and object recognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(4), 160-168.
-Kalpadakis-Smith, A.V., Goffaux, V., & Greenwood, J.A. (2018). Crowding for faces is determined by visual (not holistic) similarity: Evidence from judgements of eye position. Scientific Reports, 8 (12556), 1-14.
-Greenwood, JA, Bex, PJ, & Dakin, SC (2010). Crowding changes appearance. Current Biology, 20(6), 496-501.

Project 2: The perception of position in faces vs. simpler objects

We are experts at face recognition. Our visual system is similarly specialised, with a network of face-selective brain regions. How does this specialisation relate to earlier levels of visual processing? We will examine this via judgements of eye position within faces. Prior work has shown that shifts in eye position are easier to detect along the horizontal dimension than the vertical. This pattern differs to that found in simpler objects – in peripheral vision for instance, shifts in the position of dot elements are easier to detect in the radial dimension (along a circle with equal distance from fixation) than along the tangential dimension (towards/away from fixation). Your project could examine this discrepancy directly by comparing position judgements for eyes within faces and dot elements in peripheral vision. We aim to determine the conditions that lead to the ‘special’ pattern of selectivity observed for faces, and to understand both the development of these specialisations in the visual system and their potential neural basis. 

Relevant publications:
-Goffaux, V., & Rossion, B. (2007). Face inversion disproportionately impairs the perception of vertical but not horizontal relations between features. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 33 (4), 995-1002.
-Greenwood, J.A., Szinte, M., Sayim, B., & Cavanagh, P. (2017). Variations in crowding, saccadic precision, and spatial localization reveal the shared topology of spatial vision. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114 (17), E3573-E3582.

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Social power facilitates action and the pursuit of goals throughout all stages of goal pursuit (e.g., Guinote, 2017). At the same time, animal studies suggest that power increases dopamine levels in the midbrain, a neurotransmitter linked to motivation (e.g., Morgan et al., 2002). In this project we investigate whether power affects effort deployed during goal pursuit. We will follow a computational approach, and use a paradigm to measure effort, whereby participants decide to accept or reject offers in which different levels of reward are available for different levels of physical effort (grip force, see Husain & Roiser, 2018). This project is in collaboration with Prof Jon Roiser.

Guinote, A. (2017). How power affects people: Activating, wanting, and goal seeking. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 353-381.
Husain, M., & Roiser, J. P. (2018). Neuroscience of apathy and anhedonia: a transdiagnostic approach. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 1.
Morgan, D., Grant, K. et al., (2002). Social dominance in monkeys: dopamine D2 receptors and cocaine self-administration. Nature Neuroscience, 2, 169-174.

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Social power facilitates action and goal orientation (Guinote, 2017; Keltner, Gruenfeld, Anderson, 2003). Powerful individuals more readily take action in a variety of everyday tasks and more readily initiate and strive for active goals. It has been proposed that these effects of power derive from an activation of the Behavioural Approach System (BAS, see Keltner et al., 2003). This system functions as a positive feedback device that is responsive to the expectation of rewards, such as food or sex. BAS activity depends on dopaminergic pathways in the midbrain (Keltner et al., 2003). In this project we test the hypothesis that dopamine is crucial for power’s effect by examining the effects of empowerment on patients with Parkinson’s Disease. This is a collaborative project with Prof Marjan Jahanshahi, Institute of Neurology. 

Guinote, A. (2017). How power affects people: Activating, wanting, and goal seeking. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 353-381.
Morgan, D., Grant, K. et al., (2002). Social dominance in monkeys: dopamine D2 receptors and cocaine self-administration. Nature Neuroscience, 2, 169-174.
Obeso I, Wilkinson L, Casabona E, Bringas ML, Alvarez M, Alvarez L, Pavón N, Rodríguez-Oroz MC, Macías R, Obeso JA, Jahanshahi M. Deficits in inhibitory control and conflict resolution on cognitive and motor tasks in Parkinson's disease. Exp Brain Res. 2011 Jul;212(3):371-84.

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Casual touch signals communion sharing. When waitresses briefly touch clients, clients leave larger tips (Crusco & Wetzel, 1984). Touched recipients are more likely to agree to signing a petition (Willis & Hamm, 1980). We test the hypothesis that touch can have downstream effects, increasing the readiness for prosocial behaviour towards touch-unrelated individuals. We have examined charity donations, tipping in restaurants and spontaneous help toward touch-unrelated parties. We are currently examining underlying mechanisms. 

Galance, A., & Spence, C. (2010). The science of interpersonal touch: An overview. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 34, 246–259.
Guéguen, N., & Fisher-Lokou, J. (2003). Tactile contact and spontaneous help: an evaluation in a natural setting. Journal of Social Psychology, 143, 785–787. 
Seger, C.R., Smith, E. R., Percy, E. J., & Conrey, F., R. (2014), Reach Out and Reduce Prejudice: The Impact of Interpersonal Touch on Intergroup Liking. Basic & Applied Social Psychology, 36, 51-58. doi: 10.1080/01973533.2013.856786

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Lack of social power has been shown to enhance visual perceptual discrimination. As such powerless individuals are more vigilant and attentive to social information in others due to the challenges and uncertainty they experience. Yet, it still remains to be explored whether similar effects occur in response to facial images of the self. The proposed project builds upon a paradigm by Epley & Whitchurch (2008) by investigating whether gaining or loosing social power influences participants’ face recognition and social judgements. 
This project is in collaboration with Dr Eva Krumhuber
 
Epley, N., & Whitchurch, E. (2008). Mirror, mirror on the wall: Enhancement in self- recognition. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 1159-1170.
 Welling, L.L.M., Moreau, B.J.P., Bird, B.M., Hansen, S., & Caree, J.M. (2016). Exogeneous testosterone increases men’s perceptions of their own physical dominance. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 64, 136-142.

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Lack of social power has been shown to enhance visual perceptual discrimination. As such powerless individuals are more vigilant and attentive to social information in others due to the challenges and uncertainty they experience. Yet, it still remains to be explored whether similar effects occur in response to facial images of other people. The proposed project builds upon a paradigm by Wang, Guinote, and Krumhuber (2018) by investigating whether gaining or loosing social power influences participants’ recognition and social judgements of other people’s faces. This project is in collaboration with Dr Eva Krumhuber.
Placement: 1 student 
Requirements: Ability to recruit 35 male White/Caucasians (18-40 years)

Literature:
Wang, X., Guinote, A., & Krumhuber, E. (2018). Dominance biases in the perception and memory for the faces of power holders, with consequences for social inferences. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 78, 23-33.

Galinsky, A. D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Magee, J. C. (2003). From power to action. Journal of personality and social psychology, 85(3), 453.

Tiedens, L. Z., & Fragale, A. R. (2003). Power moves: complementarity in dominant and submissive nonverbal behavior. Journal of personality and social psychology, 84(3), 558.

Watkins, C. D., Fraccaro, P. J., Smith, F. G., Vukovic, J., Feinberg, D. R., DeBruine, L. M., & Jones, B. C. (2010). Taller men are less sensitive to cues of dominance in other men. Behavioral Ecology, 21(5), 943-947.

Yap, A. J., Mason, M. F., & Ames, D. R. (2013). The powerful size others down: The link between power and estimates of others' size. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(3), 591-594.

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I am a postdoctoral fellow at the ICN and the FIL working with Emrah Duzel and Ray Dolan. I offer a project that would involve behavioural test and modelling. The student would be looking at how contextual novelty before engaging in a decision task affects exploration. Data would be analysed with simple general lineal model and also with reinforcement learning modelling approaches.

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MSc projects in the Hamilton lab for social cognition  I am happy to supervise projects within the domains of imitation / action understanding and social neuroscience.   
This includes: 

Control of mimicry - Mimicry occurs when people spontaneously copy each other.  
Several possible projects are available to investigate which social cues change mimicry, including facial features, facial expression and unconscious priming.  Methods will build on Wang & Hamilton 2013 (http://www.antoniahamilton.com/WangHamilton_PlosOne_2013.pdf)     

Motivation & theory of mind - what motivates people to think about others & consider their viewpoint?  Projects are available which measure both motivation and mentalising abilities, building on Dubey, Ropar & Hamilton (2015) http://www.antoniahamilton.com/Dubey_MolAut_2015.pdf

[note that we will not be testing participants with autism in MSc projects]

What next?  If you are interested in any of these projects, please visit www.antoniahamilton.com to see recent work from my lab.   Then please email a.hamilton@ucl.ac.uk with a short (1 paragraph) outline of what you would like to study in your project.

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People have the ability to infer the mental states of other people and objects, as well as to fail to do so. This project examines this cognitive processes, looking at person, animal and object perception, emotional responses, and decision-making. Students interested in the general topic should contact the supervisor to discuss project specifics in any of these domains.

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2-3 projects available, both with the potential for clear applied implications. Please see the word document for further information

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For more information see this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY&feature=youtu.be

Can be run via Qualtrics

I should be able to discuss this project via email until mid-November and after mid-January.  

At present (2 October), I have still have space for five students. I accept students on a first come first served basis.

Details

Changes in the regulation of cannabis for recreational as well as medical use are currently continuing apace in many parts of the world and alongside it comes changes in the patterns of cannabis use and susceptibility to addiction. Cannabis use practices also vary across the world and there are challenges associated with working cross-culturally to ensure reliability. One of the obstacles for the design of rigorous, reproducible studies in cannabis research is the lack of suitable and validated image databases. Such a database would allow for studies to be better compared and aggregated by removing inter-lab variation. Another obstacle to cannabis research and to the creation of standardised cannabis research material, is that access to cannabis products for research purposes is restricted in many international jurisdictions and requires time-consuming and difficult-to approve home office licenses. This database will provide international researchers with ready access to already developed, high-quality pictures of cannabis and matched neutral stimuli. We foresee such a database being utilized in neuroimaging and behavioural research relevant to cannabis e.g. cue reactivity, attentional bias and cue-induced craving. 

This project aims to validate an international picture set related to cannabis consumption (both routes and different types) and matched control images in cannabis users across distinct countries, including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia and the US. We aim to investigate the association between ratings of cannabis and neutral pictures and levels of drug use and problem cannabis use. We also aim to investigate differences between countries with varying cultures, cannabis-related jurisdictions and drug use practises.
This project would suit one enthusiastic student who is interested in exploring all aspects of the research process from design to publishing. You will be working within an international team of researchers and alongside the principles of open science. The study will be designed in Qualtrics. The project will be supervised by Chandni Hindocha and Dr Tom Freeman. Please contact Chandni Hindocha (c.hindocha@ucl.ac.uk) to express your interest in this project.

Details

What does you voice sound different when you speak as opposed to when you hear a recording of it?

You will be aware that your voice sounds higher in frequency in a recording than as you speak. This is because of bone-conducted sound (bcs) which emphasizes the low frequency components of the voice. Classic estimates suggest that the level of bcs is about the same as speech going directly to the ear. This mixed sound has the low frequency emphasis, but does bcs accurately represent other components of spoken voice (e.g. the formants)? Some evidence suggest that bcs has extra resonances and damps out components present in the air-conducted sound (acs). This project dissociates bcs from acs at the brainstem level (FFR response to speech). FFRs are collected during vocalization under normal listening conditions (bcs and acs in their normal relationship) and when the air-conducted component is altered (acs selectively changed). This allows the two components to be distinguished in the FFR signal. Some knowledge of signal processing would be advantageous.

The above project is jointly supervised with Dr Tuomainen. The following three are projects with Naheem Bashir.

Using tDCS brain stimulation to enhance and improve speech processes
 
Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive method which involves applying a weak electrical current to brain regions, to increase or decrease activity in targeted brain regions, thus either improving or worsening the functions associated with that particular brain region. TDCS has been used to improve cognitive functions such as memory and general learning, as well as enhance positive treatment outcomes of disorders such as depression and aphasia. In our studies, we are attempting to show that tDCS can be used to improve speech control in healthy individuals. These findings will then be taken forward to enhance the positive effects of treatment for people with the speech disorder of stuttering. For example, using tDCS alongside an already effective treatment may increase positive treatment effects by up to 50%, as tDCS has been shown to do in stroke rehabilitation research. You will receive full training with the tDCS equipment, and be fully involved in study design, data collection and analysis. 

Examining the effect of social evaluation and observation on sensorimotor integration, motor control and speech motor control using fNIRS

Research suggests that observation or perceived judgements by another person can affect one’s performance during a task. We want to explore this principle using behavioural and neuroimaging studies with functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The advantage of fNIRS, as opposed to more common methods such as fMRI, is tasks can be conducted in a more naturalistic setting allowing for examination of the neural substrates of social situations. In one study, participants will be observed by another person whilst they complete sensorimotor integration, motor and speech tasks. In the second study, alongside sensorimotor integration, motor and speech tasks, participants will view facial expressions that correspond to neutral, negative or positive evaluation of their performance. With these studies, we can therefore assess the influence of social variables on motor performance and assess associated neural correlates. This research is particularly relevant to disorders such as stuttering, a speech motor disorder, where the level of speech difficulty experienced varies across contexts and social situations. You will receive full training with the fNIRS equipment, and be fully involved in study design, data collection and analysis. 

Using fNIRS to explore speech processes, sensorimotor integration and contextual variability of speech fluency in people who stutter (PWS)

Stuttering is a speech disorder which affects around 70 million around the world, and involves disruption in the rhythm, timing and flow of speech. As a result of the physical communication impairment, quality of life is affected in PWS across social, educational and employment contexts. The disorder is commonly thought to be a motor disorder, and more recently a sensorimotor integration issue. Neuroimaging research into stuttering typically involves unrealistic environments due to the use of restrictive and limited imaging methods such as fMRI. With the use of fNIRS, we can assess stuttering brain activity in more realistic environments as well as explore social influences on stuttering to try and understand its social and contextual variability. Our fNIRS studies will involve assessing brain activity of PWS during conversation with a person who does not stutter; during speech and sensorimotor integration tasks; and fluency enhancing and worsening conditions. Our studies will allow us to gain an insight into the process of dysfunction in stuttered speech in social and non social situations; the breakdown of sensorimotor integration processes; and the neural correlates of fluent speech produced by PWS, and how this breaks down to produce stuttered speech. You will receive full training with the fNIRS equipment, and be fully involved in study design, data collection and analysis. 


Three more projects on altered auditory feedback in PWS    

Project 1: This experiment tests how quickly feedback affects speech control and how quickly the effects dissipate when altered feedback is switched off in PWS. . Two tasks are employed: One examines how fluency is affected by the alteration in PWS with fluent speakers as controls; and the other examines speech control in general under the alteration to see whether both groups of speakers are affected and, if so, whether they are affected in the same or different ways. In the task to study fluency, altered feedback is delivered on stutters that the PWS (and possibly controls) produce and time to recover fluency is compared between these and stutters that receive no alteration. In the task to study general speech control, speakers produce four syllables and one of them receives an alteration. Similar comparisons are made between altered and non-altered syllables as was done when fluency control was examined. In both tasks, the time course that the alteration has on speech control in general (PWS and fluent controls) and fluency control in particular (PWS) are established.     

Project 2: The hypothesis is that adaptation occurs in PWS who reduce voice level as this leads to less feedback and thereby decreases the fluency-enhancing effect of the alterations (Howell & Archer, 1984). There are two parts to this study First, the hypothesis predicts that PWS who adapt will tend to reduce their voice level more than those who do not adapt. Voice level will be measured to test this. The second study tests whether an automatic gain control (AGC) reinstates fluency in PWS who adapt to altered feedback. The first part should show that speakers who adapt to the effects of altered feedback do so by reducing voice level that also decreases feedback level. This would be prevented by using an AGC. The AGC adjusts voice intensity to a preset level that neutralizes reductions in speech level leading to reductions in level of the altered sound. The boost to the intensity of the altered feedback delivered by the AGC when voice level drops allows the PWS who would have adapted to maintain the fluency-enhancing effects.     Project 3:  General background to motor learning project and altered feedback  The study ascertains what affects learning and retention rates of induced fluency; comparison will be with immediate feedback where little retention of induced fluency is expected. In this project, PWS will be tested at different points over 20 sessions and learning rates will be determined. The experiments will continue for another 10 sessions without alteration in one group (and with alteration in another group) to determine transfer and its retention over time. In these studies, altered feedback delivered on stutters is considered to reinforce fluent behavior on these episodes s indicated next.     There are two parts to this project. The first tests whether targeting alterations on difficult material externally (i.e. by the experimenter) is more effective at inducing fluency than targeting them at random and possibly as effective as having the alterations on continuously.     The second part tests whether targeting alterations on material that is spoken rapidly will be more effective at inducing fluency than targeting alterations at random and possibly on speech that varies in difficulty. The combined effect of difficulty and rate (current study) will also be determined. It is expected that if material is spoken rapidly and fast, it would be more difficult than speech that is spoken in only one of these ways.     One project on categorical perception     Project: Categorical perception (CP) of Mandarin tones by English and Mandarin speakers  Hypothesis : Mandarin speakers will show CP performance, but the English speakers will show less CP effects.  Categorical perception (CP) refers to phenomena observed in the identification and discrimination mainly (but not exclusively) of speech sounds. This project uses continua that vary between a rising to a falling tone. They are identified as rise, flat and fall. We will examine  identification and discrimination of these sounds in speakers who use them conventionally in their language (Mandarin-speaking students) and those who do not (English-speaking students). A further rtest will be whether speakers transfer the tones they have learned to novel syllables.  Requirements: Matlab programming.

Details

Judgments by teachers and therapists when deciding whether a child needs speech therapy  Maarten Speekenbrink looked at models concerning how decisions were made in groups in his PhD thesis (see chapter 5 in http://dare.uva.nl/document/2/35501). We want to take this forward and see how it applies in a realistic situation involving how teachers and speech-language therapists (SLTs) make decisions about referral of children for treatment of speech difficulties. Whilst both teachers and SLTs both take speech-based measures into account when making their decisions, teachers take factors associated with educational attainment into account, whereas  SLTs take factors associated with ongoing speech difficulty into  account. As preparation, we need to estimate the relative weighting placed on speech cues versus other cues and the weightings of the cues employed by individual groups. The second experiment in chapter 5 (p.90) of MS’s PhD looks at a partly shared, partly distributed (e.g., hybrid) environment, so assessment of cases where teachers and SLTs both use the same, but also unique information, is possible. Another possibility is that if both use different information, but still make judgements about the same children, a situation more like the distributed task in Experiment 1 occurs. Both of these are potential models of the decision processes behind what the 2 groups do. We will examine such models and establish the impact making decisions in these various ways affects judgment performance. This should provide information to establish whether current ways of making decisions about a child are made in a satisfactory way and suggest ways of improving such mutual decisions. This is a joint proposal by Peter Howell and Maarten Speekenbrink (the main day to day supervision of the project will be by Howell).

Details

Interventions for SLCN in reception classes:
We are working with various schools identifying any of the children starting school who have various types of expressive speech difficulty. We screen all the children (many of whom speak English as an Additional Language, EAL). We are able to identify which children have serious difficulties that may call for intervention by a Speech and Language therapist. Some of the children who speak English only (EO) or EAL have word-finding difficulties (WFD) and we offer children who speak English Only (CwEO) or English as an Additional Language (CwEAL) interventions for this issue. The interventions provide: 1) phonological training (non-word repetition) for all children; and 2) training to avoid disruption due to conflicting meanings similar sound patterns can have between the languages a CwEAL may speak. The interventions are intended to improve primary school children’s language (including fluency and word-finding), literacy and phonological skills. The non-word training materials employ sound patterns that occur in English that are challenging for children (the type of material that is most challenging depends on the languages that a child speaks). English words that contain sound patterns with the same underlying form as the non-word material are then used to determine whether the training transfers to real words. CwEAL are trained next with speech sounds that activate the same or different meanings in the two languages that they speak. They are required to produce the English form when meanings differ across their languages. CwEO are trained to link each speech sound with its meaning. Language, literacy and phonological skills are being assessed before and after the intervention to establish improvements in performance. Speech fluency and word-finding tests are also assessed. The intervention is delivered by researchers at present but it is designed to be efficient and easy for teachers to use (project 4 will work on computer programmes for administration of tests and for scoring). It is unlikely that you will have police checks that would allow you to work in schools. But you can get involved by helping on the studies. Particular languages we are currently working with in schools are Polish and Urdu/Hindi (you may be interested if you speak one of these languages) and a similar test for Spanish is to be designed in the next project.

Spanish

Phonological non-word training material and semantic materials that have the same or different meanings across languages are required for training children who use Spanish as their first language to speak English and vice versa. To design the phonological material, the first task (done) is to identify those phonological features that are shared across English and Spanish (neither group of children need to acquire these). Phonological features specific to each language (outside the preceding set) then specify what children using Spanish but needing to use English (or vice versa) need to learn. This is one task that need to be conducted. The second task is to identify words with very similar sound forms that have one (termed true friends, TF) or two (termed false friends, FF) meanings across the two languages. TF help second language learning whereas false friends can cause interference. The training procedure mixes up TF and FF training to avoid problems caused by FF. An initial selection of TF and FF is prepared by a computational linguist who is part of the team. Some properties are compared for you (e.g. word frequency) but all materials need checking by someone who is fluent in both languages. Once the selection has been made, picture stimuli need to be generated to conduct the test. A pilot test (on a small number of adults) should be conducted so that the study can be written up as a research report.

Details

We have several projects available over the coming year, with the general theme being general motor and speech motor control.

Using tDCS brain stimulation to enhance and improve speech processes
 
Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive method which involves applying a weak electrical current to brain regions, to increase or decrease activity in targeted brain regions, thus either improving or worsening the functions associated with that particular brain region. TDCS has been used to improve cognitive functions such as memory and general learning, as well as enhance positive treatment outcomes of disorders such as depression and aphasia. In our studies, we are attempting to prove that tDCS can be used to improve speech in healthy individuals. These findings will then be taken forward to enhance the positive effects of treatment for people with the speech disorder of stuttering. For example, using tDCS alongside an already effective treatment may increase positive treatment effects by up to 50%, as tDCS has been shown to do in stroke rehabilitation research. You will receive full training with the tDCS equipment, and be fully involved in study design, data collection and analysis. 

Examining the effect of social evaluation and observation on sensorimotor integration, motor control and speech motor control using fNIRS

Research suggests that observation or perceived judgements by another person can affect one’s performance during a task. We want to explore this principle using behavioural and neuroimaging studies with functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The advantage of fNIRS, as opposed to more common methods such as fMRI, is tasks can be conducted in a more naturalistic setting allowing for examination of the neural substrates of social situations. In one study, participants will be observed by another person whilst they complete sensorimotor integration, motor and speech tasks. In the second study, alongside sensorimotor integration, motor and speech tasks, participants will view facial expressions that correspond to neutral, negative or positive evaluation of their performance. With these studies, we can therefore assess the influence of social variables on motor performance and assess associated neural correlates. This research is particularly relevant to disorders such as stuttering, a speech motor disorder, where the level of speech difficulty experienced varies across contexts and social situations. You will receive full training with the fNIRS equipment, and be fully involved in study design, data collection and analysis. 

Using fNIRS to explore speech processes, sensorimotor integration and contextual variability of speech fluency in people who stutter (PWS)

Stuttering is a speech disorder which affects around 70 million around the world, and involves disruption in the rhythm, timing and flow of speech. As a result of the physical communication impairment, quality of life is hugely affected in PWS across social, educational and employment contexts. The disorder is commonly thought to be a motor disorder, and more recently a sensorimotor integration issue. Neuroimaging research into stuttering typically involves unrealistic environments due to the use of restrictive and limited imaging methods such as fMRI. With the use of fNIRS, we can assess stuttering brain activity in more realistic environments as well as explore social influences on stuttering to try and understand it’s social and contextual variability. Our fNIRS studies will involve assessing brain activity of PWS during conversation with a person who does not stutter; during speech and sensorimotor integration tasks; and fluency enhancing and worsening conditions. Our studies will allow us to gain an insight into the process of dysfunction in stuttered speech in social and non social situations; the breakdown of sensorimotor integration processes; and the neural correlates of fluent speech produced by PWS, and how this breaks down to produce stuttered speech. You will receive full training with the fNIRS equipment, and be fully involved in study design, data collection and analysis.

Details

Project title: The study of estimation using constructive paradigm.    
Supervised: Slava Karolis and Brian Butterworth.  

The real-world tasks bear a structural resemblance to magnitude estimation, in that people have to evaluate or classify a sequence of stimuli. Very often this resemblance results in a similarity of model functions (e.g. the response function for numerical estimation has analogous to utility function in economics logarithmic form).  We would like to investigate the decision making process and the effect of non-numerical factors in numerical estimation tasks. We are interested if the performance involving an active re-construction of numerical sets will dissociate from observations reported for forced-choice tasks. We designed a novel paradigm and made its basic implementation in Matlab. The design of experiment(s) will be finalised after consultation with an interested person. The project may be attractive for those who are interested in data modelling. Some knowledge of Matlab would be helpful.

Details

Title: Representation of timing in pseudo-speech sequences

Study background: Recent studies have revealed that skilled motor sequences such as precisely timed sequences of finger presses are encoded in a modular fashion - with temporal and spatial features of sequences represented separately from each other to enable flexible motor control (Kornysheva et al. 2013, Kornysheva & Diedrichsen 2014, Diedrichsen and Kornysheva 2015). While this effect has been replicated in finger movement sequences, it is unclear in how far speech sequences – ubiquitous in everyday life – follow the same encoding pattern. This project will be the first to study the presence of modular representations pseudo-speech sequences in a behavioural training paradigm. 

Potential significance: Results will open up opportunities for future neuroimaging studies on speech like sequence acquisition, retrieval and control and may become relevant for the understanding and treatment of speech disorders like dyspraxia and stuttering.

Your contribution: You will be involved in running the bevioural pilots and study, adjusting the experimental setup (cogent code etc.) and co-analysing the behavioural data. Programming skills in Matlab and very good organisational skills are, and/or knowledge of speech/auditory analysis software (PRAAT or similar) or relevant Matlab toolboxes are highly desired, as well as a strong interest in procedural memory encoding and motor/speech control.

References:
Kornysheva K*, Sierk A, Diedrichsen J (2013) Interaction of temporal and ordinal representations in movement sequences. Journal of Neurophysiology 109(5):1416-1424.
Kornysheva K* & Diedrichsen J (2014). Human premotor areas parse sequences into their spatial and temporal features. eLife doi: 10.7554/eLife.030433.
Diedrichsen J & Kornysheva K (2015). Motor skill learning between selection and execution. Trends in Cognitive Science 19(4):227-233.

Details

The project aims to test chatbot user experiences of people with and without disabilities in order to gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which people engage with current chatbot technology. The student will contribute to the experimental evaluation of a range of state-of-the-art chatbots. The measures used to evaluate the data from this experimentation will assess each chatbot in terms of accessibility, usability, equality and fairness. 

Placement: 1 student

Details

Lack of social power has been shown to enhance visual perceptual discrimination. As such powerless individuals are more vigilant and attentive to social information in others due to the challenges and uncertainty they experience. Yet, it still remains to be explored whether similar effects occur in response to facial images of the self. The proposed project builds upon a paradigm by Epley & Whitchurch (2008) by investigating whether gaining or loosing social power influences participants’ self-recognition and social judgements. 
This project is in collaboration with Dr Ana Guinote. 

Placement: 2 students 
Requirements: Ability to recruit 35 (14 female, 21 male) White/Caucasians (18-40 years)


Literature:
Epley, N., & Whitchurch, E. (2008). Mirror, mirror on the wall: Enhancement in self- recognition. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 1159-1170.

Duguid, M.M., & Goncalo, J. A. (2011). The powerful overestimate their own height. Psychological Science, 23, 36-40.

Haines, E. L., & Kray, L. J. (2005). Self-power associations: The possession of power impacts women’s self-concepts. European Journal of Social Psychology, 35, 643-662.

Kraus, M. W., Chen, S., & Keltner, D. (2011). The power to be me: Power elevates self-concept consistency and authenticity. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 974-980.

Welling, L.L.M., Moreau, B.J.P., Bird, B.M., Hansen, S., Carree, J.M. (2016). Exogenous testosterone increases men’s perceptions of their own physical dominance. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 64, 136-142

Details

Three interconnected streams: Exploring how people construct and use causal models; how they use causal models to make sense of complex evidence; how they use models to attribute responsibility

Details

The impact of early nutrition on cognitive functioning in mature adults born preterm
Prematurity is a major cause of morbidity and a large burden on health care and special education resources (around £3 bn/ year in the UK). The most important adverse long-term outcomes of prematurity relate to the brain. Those born preterm have lower cognitive performance, on average a 12-point reduction in IQ, with deficits in specific cognitive functions such as arithmetic, nonverbal executive functions and behavioural difficulties.
Nutrition is viewed as the single environmental variable with the widest range of possible effects on brain development. Our own studies and those of others show that, in humans, the developing brain is particularly vulnerable to nutritional insults prior to full term.
The first randomised trials were conducted at ICH over 30 years ago with follow-up studies into adolescence showing major long term effects of preterm nutritional interventions on cognition, behaviour, educational performance and the incidence of neurodevelopmental impairment. Follow-up studies have been confined to infancy, childhood and occasionally adolescence. Our own research indicates that those born preterm have significant and unexpected decline in cognitive function tracked so far from childhood into adolescence, making further follow-up important to define the ultimate long-term outcome effects which are currently unknown. This project therefore proposes to examine the consequences of early nutrition in preterms on cognitive functioning and cerebral structure measured using a cognitive battery and MRI in mature adults in their early 30s when the brain is at its most developmentally stable.

The cognitive assessment:
·         Behavioural outcomes – Achenbach system of Empirically Based Assessment and a life satisfaction questionnaire.
·         Overall cognitive level – the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence – II (WASI-II)
·         Attainments - We will use the Numerical Operations and Maths Reasoning sub-tests from the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test –II (WIAT-II) to assess numerical ability and the Adult Reading Test (ART)35 to measure reading accuracy and comprehension.
·         Memory - We will use the Verbal Paired Associates (Immediate, Delayed and Recognition scores) sub-test from the Wechsler Memory Scale – IV to assess relational learning and the Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test – 3 to obtain measures of impairment in certain aspects of everyday memory.
·         Executive Functions - We plan to use selected stand-alone subtests from the Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System (D-KEFS) to assess various aspects of frontal-lobe based tasks such as problem solving, concept formation and flexibility of thinking.
·         Visuo-spatial – We plan to use subtests that assess visual-spatial perception from the Visual Object and Space Perception Battery.
·         Speed   We will measure speed of processing at two different levels.  Simple and complex reaction time tasks will be administered via computer and be recorded in milliseconds.
A Quick Test of Cognitive Speed will measure processing speed at a more cognitive level.
Measures of height, weight and head circumference will be obtained, as well as information regarding educational achievements, socio-economic status (allowing determination of social mobility) and record of employment.

Details

Nilli Lavie, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
n.lavie@ucl.ac.uk

Field of research: Attention and Cognitive control

Projects are available in one of the four  lines described below, as well as in other areas of our research interests (developed together with the individual student).

1)	Time perception and attention: establish a new phenomenon of blindness to time under different types of processing load
2)	Establishing the effects of motivation and reward on focused attention 
3)	Effects of attention on the pupil response
4)	Establishing neural markers of “Inattentional deafness”  using Magnetoencephalography (MEG)

Current Research and Interests
My research group focuses on the psychological and neural mechanisms of attention and distraction, cognitive control, visual awareness, working memory and emotion. We have a special focus on investigating information processing capacity and the effects of different types of information load on brain activity, cognitive function and task performance, neural correlates of awareness and executive frontal control of attention and behavior. We also study individual differences in attention abilities. To study these issues we use behavioral experiments (and visual psychophysics) combined with functional MRI, Magnetoencephalography (MEG), and measures of the eye pupil all in human subjects.

PDF copies of papers from our lab and more information about our research can be found on our web site: http://www.icn.ucl.ac.uk/lavielab

A few relevant papers:

Cartwright-Finch, U. and Lavie, N. (2007). The role of perceptual load in Inattentional Blindness. Cognition, 102(3), 321-340

Macdonald, J. & Lavie, N. (2011) Visual perceptual load induces inattentional deafness. Attention Perception & Psychophysics, 73(6), 1780-1789

Lavie, N. (2010) Attention, Distraction and Cognitive Control under Load. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(3), 143-158.

Lavie, N. (2005) Distracted and confused?: selective attention under load. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 75-82.

Details

We are looking for 2-4 masters students to work as part of our team in our large, cutting-edge MRC-funded study which is investigating whether teenagers are more vulnerable than adults to the potential non-acute (i.e. longer term) harms of cannabis. We are aiming to recruit 360 participants (90 teenage cannabis users, 90 teenage controls, 90 adult cannabis users and 90 controls) and we test each of them five times over one year. We carefully measure cannabis and other drug use, using detailed self-report and biological samples, as well as clinical interviews for substance use disorder. Our outcome variables include: working memory, episodic memory, impulsivity, cannabis dependence, effort-related decision-making, psychotic-like symptoms, depression, and anxiety.

We are currently midway through this study, so some benefits of choosing this as your project are that: (1) it is an existing study that you can start work on straight away; (2) you will have a large sample. We are a large, friendly team, and you’ll receive lots of supervision.

As we are assessing a number of outcome variables, there is scope for up to four students to work on this project. You would be able to choose the part of study that interests you most for your project.

Details

We are looking for two masters students to work as part of our team in our large, cutting-edge MRC-funded study which is investigating the differential acute effects of cannabis (with and without cannabidiol - CBD) on brain and behaviour, in teenagers and adults. We are aiming to recruit 60 participants (30 teenage cannabis users and 30 adult cannabis users), with each participant administered cannabis with and without CBD, and matched placebo, in a double-blind, crossover design. We will measure brain function using fMRI, while participants complete tasks assessing: working memory, impulsivity and reward anticipation, as well as resting-state brain activity. Furthermore, we will assess: subjective response to the drug, psychotic-like symptoms, episodic memory, attentional bias and effort-related decision-making.

This study will start soon, so you would help to set up and pilot the experiment, with data collection expected to begin in November/December 2018. You would be able to choose the part of the experiment that interests you most for your project. We are a large, friendly team, and you’ll receive lots of supervision.

Details

The work of Dr Rebecca Lawson, a post-doc with Prof Geraint Rees, largely concerns sensory expectations and their violations. Current questions include how culture affects perceptual expectations, how non-invasive brain stimulation affects sensory learning and how ‘low-level’ visual regions may represent ‘higher-order’ expectations.

Projects on offer

1)	Eye gaze perception in autism spectrum disorders 

This project will involve running behavioural tasks in adults with autism and matched controls. The project concerns how adults with autism represent different eye gaze directions and tests predictions from computational models suggesting that a failure of divisive normalisation may underlie difficulties processing eye gaze in autism. Literature here: 
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23583965
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ari_Rosenberg/publication/280534517_A_computational_perspective_on_autism/links/55b83c0808ae092e965880bd.pdf


2)	Brain stimulation studies of sensory learning
This study will use brain stimulation techniques (tDCS) to modulate sensory learning in healthy adults. Computational models (Hierarchical Gaussian Filter) of behaviour (Reaction Times) will be used to quantify tDCS induced changes in learning under uncertainty. Relevant literature here: 
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/30/9/3210.short
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00825/abstract



3)	Defining the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus in human neuroimaging studies
This project will involve working with high-resolution anatomical images of the human brain (data already collected). The LGN will be manually delineated and the size, volume and average location of the LGN will be quantified. The resulting project will resemble the following paper:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22986224

An exceptional student with previous experience of pattern classification analysis, may also be given the opportunity to analyse the BOLD imaging data that accompanies these structural images using multivariate decoding techniques. E.g: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v18/n4/full/nn.3967.html



Requirements

All projects require commitment, independence, good time keeping, organisational skills and a basic working understanding of statistics. Knowledge of Matlab – or a strong willingness/ability to learn - is highly desirable. 

Please send a CV to: rebecca.lawson@ucl.ac.uk and write a few words about the sort of project you might be interested in.  website bit.ly/beckyneuro

Details

Our lab focuses on representational spaces. Current projects look at how to measure similarity between brain states, how to estimate the functional dimensionality of different brain regions, or at how attention has effects on neural representations. We leverage computational models to do inference on the operations realized by the human brain. If any of these topics interest you, please contact Prof. Brad Love (b.love@ucl.ac.uk) or Sebastian Bobadilla Suarez (sebastian.suarez.12@ucl.ac.uk).

Details

Project description:

We are interested in how mood influences the choices people make and how this relates to mood disorders. Good moods may make us perceive rewards as being better than they actually are. This may drive us to pursue them more vigorously and to take bigger risks than we might normally take, something seen in mood disorders like bipolar disorder.

· Can computational models inspired by neuroscience explain why shifts in mood bias our perception of rewards and our willingness to take risks? When is this mood bias helpful and when does it cause problems that might make people vulnerable to mood disorders? We conduct experiments in healthy participants and patients with bipolar disorder. 

· We also use a combination of lab-based tasks and those using online ‘big data’ platforms capable of collecting data from thousands of subjects. We are collaborating on developing a large scale smartphone app that will be released through the app store. This will involve working with our developer to translate existing experimental tasks from the lab into more playable versions on the app.

· Neuroimaging: This project joins up with simultaneously acquired functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) data collected in patients with bipolar disorder. Students with existing experience of neuroimaging analysis will have the option to pose questions to these datasets.

Research details:

- Contribute to development of the task and recruit and test subjects.

- Contribute to behavioural analysis using computational models of decision-making.

- Contribute to neural analysis of simultaneous EEG-fMRI data

Requirements:

- Interest in the neuroscience of decision-making and emotion.

- An interest in designing experiments in new online platforms (e.g. Gorilla) and/or Cogent Toolbox (Matlab) is strongly preferred

- Prior experience with Matlab or any computer programming languages is preferred.

- Prior experience testing human subjects in psychology experiments is preferred.

- Will undertake safety training and operational training for MRI.


Contact details:

Please email l.mason@ucl.ac.uk with a paragraph about how you think the project would look, your availability, and your CV.

Details

Please contact Dr. Mobini for more information about these project

Details

Please contact Dr. Mobini for more information about these project

Details

Language Change as Iterated Chinese Whispers     

Language change can be thought of as an iterated sequence of 'Chinese Whispers' game writ large over many repeated mutations. Any model of long-term mutation should ideally be compatible with understanding the mechanisms of single mutations themselves. In this project we will make use of annotating and analyzing a database of over 2000 spontaneously notated slips of the ear -- moments in which utterances such as 'You minus the freakout mode' are perceived as 'You minus the free download'. Slips of the ear occur most often in noisy environments (e.g. pubs), over bad connections (e.g. cell phones), during dialect contact (where the allophonic rules may differ between speaker and hearer), and in song lyrics (where instrumental music and rhythmic demands may compromise clarity). The input and output of this perception process are best modeled by taking into account factors such as consonant identification cues, stressed vs. unstressed syllables, and word boundary ambiguity. The goal of this project will be to produce a 'confusion matrix' of slips of the ear, analyzing the mechanisms that give rise to them and attempting to illustrate their applicability for understanding the recurrent and categorical slips that ultimately constitute one source of language change.

Details

Pitch Changes in Drunken Speech  
Supervisors:  Andrew Nevins – a.nevins@ucl.ac.uk 
 Kevin Tang – kevin.tang.10@ucl.ac.uk  
Department: Department of Linguistics  
Title: Pitch variability in intoxicated speech by tonal language speakers (particularly Mandarin Chinese/Yoruba)  

Summary:  Previously studies with intoxicated speech have consistently shown that pitch varies significantly more in intoxicated conditions than in sober conditions. (Johnson, Pisoni & Bernacki 1990)  A question that arises from this finding is whether this pitch variability with alcohol also applies to speakers of tonal languages, such as Mandarin Chinese and Yoruba. Given that in tonal languages, pitch is used primarily to encode lexical differences and therefore bears a high functional load, the hypothesis would be that the pitch variability due to alcohol would be smaller in tonal languages than non-tonal languages.  In this project, you will test whether the effect of alcohol on pitch variability in tonal languages differs from that in non-tonal languages.  You will conduct a production experiment, which involves reading a play/dialogue with participants in both sober and drunk conditions; administering alcohol to participants; measuring alcohol levels using a breath-analyser. You will subsequently analyse the results.  (Training and guidance will be provided in nearly all of the stages).  [This project has UCL ethics approval.]  What the project will offer you:  •Experience with a novel methodology of using alcohol, and applying it in linguistics and speech science  •Experience with talking with intoxicated participants, mixing basic cocktails and using a breathanalyser.  •Experience with recording speech materials in a professional recording environment;  •Experience with acoustic data analysis;  •Experience with conducting experiments in linguistics and speech science.  Required skills:  •Native speaker knowledge of a tonal language (particularly Mandarin Chinese or Yoruba);  •No known language-related impairments (e.g. speaking/listening/reading);  •Ability to think and work independently;  •Basic Statistics skills (SPSS / R / Excel);  •Some knowledge of Praat (training and guidance will be provided).  Required commitment:  The project will require ~30 hours of data collection. Tasks include preparing the production experiment (stimulus material, consent forms, experimental instructions, and running sheets), recruiting the participants, preparing the recordings for analysis, conducting the production experiment, participating in data analysis).  Recommended Reading:  Johnson, K., Pisoni, D. B., & Bernacki, R. H. (1990). Do voice recordings reveal whether a person is intoxicated? A case study. Phonetica, 47(3-4), 215-237.  Chin, S. B., & Pisoni, D. B. (1997). Alcohol and speech. Academic Press.

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Speech perception in Mandarin Chinese  
Supervisors:  Andrew Nevins – a.nevins@ucl.ac.uk  
Kevin Tang – kevin.tang.10@ucl.ac.uk  
Department: Department of Linguistics     

Title: Speech mis-segmentation in Mandarin Chinese  

Summary:  As you are reading this sentence, the blank spaces and the letters are providing you with reliable information of word boundaries and of corresponding acoustic sounds, however our speech perceptual system does not have these privileges as speech is often a continuous acoustic signal with very few interruptions and can be distorted with noise. (Mattys, White, & Melhorn, 2005). Cutler & Butterfield (1992) have shown that in English, speakers would mis-segment speech depending on whether a syllable is stressed or not, e.g. “Soon the poLICE were waiting” was misperceived as “Soothe the LEAST where waiting” (The bold and capitalised letters denotes a stressed syllable). The study suggested that this is due the fact that English is a trochaic language, that is with a lot more words with the stressed pattern, strong-weak (e.g. BOttle, Water etc.) than weak-strong, (e.g. giRAFFE, haRASS etc.)  The literature has a mixed view about whether Mandarin Chinese is also a trochaic language like English. A question that arises from this is whether Mandarin Chinese would have the same mis-segmentation pattern as English. The hypothesis would be that if Mandarin Chinese speakers would mis-segment speech the same as English, then it would suggest that it is a trochaic language. In this project, you will follow the footsteps of Cutler & Butterfield (1992) but with Mandarin Chinese.  You will conduct a perception experiment, which involves recording Chinese sentences, presenting the sentences to participants, and analysing the participants' responses.  (Guidance and training will be provided in all of the stages).  [This project has UCL ethics approval.]  What the project will offer you:  •Experience with recording speech materials in a professional recording environment;  •Experience with interacting with participants  •Experience with conducting experiments in linguistics and speech science.  Required skills:  •Native speaker knowledge of Mandarin Chinese  •No known language-related impairments (e.g. speaking/listening/reading);  •Ability to think and work independently;  •Basic Statistics skills (SPSS / R / Excel);  Required commitment:  The project will require ~20 hours of data collection. Tasks include preparing the perception experiment (the stimulus material, consent forms, experimental instructions, and running sheets), recruiting the participants, preparing the responses for analysis, conducting the perception experiment, participating in data analysis).  Recommended Reading:  Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (1992). Rhythmic cues to speech segmentation: Evidence from juncture misperception. Journal of Memory and Language, 31(2), 218-236.  Mattys, S. L., White, L., & Melhorn, J. F. (2005). Integration of multiple speech segmentation cues: a hierarchical framework. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134(4), 477.

Details

Please see attached word doc

Details

Dr. Alexandra Perovic, research projects for non-clinical degrees

1. What is the link between language and numeracy in individuals with Williams syndrome? 
Dr Alexandra Perovic and Dr Chris Donlan, University College London

It is well known that people with Williams syndrome have difficulties with counting and number skills.  However, the language abilities of people with Williams syndrome are known to be relatively good, and often superior to their number abilities. The question that we would like to explore is whether people with Williams are able to use and understand words referring to quantity (known as ‘quantifiers’): every, all, some, in addition to the actual number words (‘numerals’): one, two, three, four. We also want to see how this knowledge is related to practical counting skills. Quantifiers and numerals are similar in terms of their language function, and research with typically developing children shows that the language of number is interwoven with the development of number concepts and skills. Our study aims to explore this question further, and to examine the relation between language and number in people with Williams syndrome. This study will help us to understand the reasons for their particular difficulties with number, and will help teachers and families to support number learning more effectively. 

The study began in September 2010, thus the ethics approval is already in place. So far around 35 typically developing control children have been tested, and 2 adolescents with WS. We need to test further 15 typically developing children, aged 6-8, and around 20 children and adolescents with WS. 
Individuals with WS are being recruited with the help of Williams Syndrome Foundation, but typically developing controls will be recruited by the students on this project. We need one more MSc student, CRB checked, to join our team: Alex and Chris, the principal investigators, and Emily, Year B student, MSc Speech Sciences. 


2. Complex Grammar in Autism Spectrum Disorders 
Dr Alexandra Perovic, University College London, Dr Vikki Janke, University of Kent

This project investigates aspects of complex grammar in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and typically developing children, in particular, the ‘control’ structures, involving verbs such as ‘promise’ and ‘persuade’ (Homer promised Marge to read a book, vs. Homer persuaded Marge to read a book).  
Comparisons of language abilities in different populations help answer the more general question of how syndrome-specific impairments can affect language acquisition, and especially which modules of the language faculty (e.g. syntax vs. pragmatics) are most affected. An understanding of the interaction between language and cognition in ASD will also provide insight into how these systems interact in typical development. In this experimental study, children with ASD will be compared to typically developing children on measures of non-verbal abilities, as well as verbal abilities. 

The project has been approved by UCL Ethics Committee and has been running for several months now. The students who join our team will have to obtain CRB clearance. They will be responsible for administering standardized tests of verbal and non-verbal abilities and the language task (shown to participants on a laptop computer) to 10-20 typically developing children, aged 6-9, and potentially to several children with autism (aged 12-18). The recruitment of children with autism and typically developing controls has already started, and some children have been tested on both the standardized tests and the experimental task. The students will be trained in how to administer all the tasks, and will be accompanied by Alex and Vikki if testing children with autism. 


3. Metaphor comprehension in Autism Spectrum Disorder
Dr Alexandra Perovic, Dr Nausicaa Pouscoulous 

This study examines autistic children’s understanding of metaphors - linguistic expressions whose interpretation goes beyond literal meaning, for which both syntactic and pragmatic abilities are utilized. Known for their impaired pragmatic abilities, individuals with autism generally have difficulties with interpreting metaphors. This study will be the first to use the method of novel metaphor, used by Dr. Nausicaa Pouscoulous in her work with TD children. 
Comparisons of language abilities in different populations will help answer the more general question of how syndrome-specific impairments can affect language acquisition, and especially which modules of the language faculty (e.g. syntax vs. pragmatics) are most affected. An understanding of the interaction between language and cognition in ASD will also provide insight into how these systems interact in typical development. In this experimental study, children with ASD will be compared to typically developing children on measures of non-verbal abilities, as well as verbal abilities. 
The project has been approved by UCL Ethics Committee and has been running for several months now. The student who joins our team will have to obtain CRB clearance and will be responsible for administering standardized tests of verbal and non-verbal abilities and the metaphor task to typically developing children, aged 6-9, and to several children with autism, aged 12-18. The recruitment of participants has already started. We need one more MSc student to join our team: Alex and Nausicaa, the principal investigators, and Anisa, Year B student, MSc Speech Sciences.

Details

Several projects are available.

Projects will explore various topics within evidential, probabilistic, and causal reasoning. 
This is based on work relating to the domain of Intelligence Analysis. 
It looks to improve the understanding of how reasoners actually (vs should) deal with uncertainty, so as to accurately make diagnoses (inferring from known effects to probable causes), and predictions (inferring from known causes to probable effects).

Details

It is anticipated to most likely be of interest to students on the Research Methods Course.   


Background: Identifying modifiable environmental exposures that are causally related to psychopathology is crucial for designing effective evidence-based social policies and interventions. To date, however, establishing whether a correlation between a risk factor (e.g. low birth weight) and a psychopathology-related outcome (e.g. hyperactivity) reflects a truly causal relationship or a spurious association remains a major challenge. This is because observational studies are biased and give rise to many non-causal associations between risk factors and outcomes. The research conducted for this project will use innovative designs to address this issue and make stronger causal inference. Such approaches can have a great impact on our causal understanding of the development of psychopathology and have important implications in terms of interventions and policies.

The problem of confounding: In observational studies, there is a major problem of confounding, which can lead to the observed associations between different types of substances even without the presence of true causal relationships. However, innovative statistical approaches and quasi-experimental designs can help us to make better causal inference. The research will implement such methods on large longitudinal studies such as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. 

Examples of projects can be:

-The role of low birth weight on early psychopathology. Low birth weight has been associated with symptoms like hyperactivity/impulsivity symptoms. However, why this is the case is still unclear. We can use the discordant identical twin design to address this question (i.e. verify whether the twin with the lower birth weight also has long-term elevated hyperactivity/impulsivity symptoms, which indicates a likely causal relationships). 

- Use longitudinal structural equation modelling (e.g. cross-lagged modelling) to examine reciprocal causal associations between the use of different type of substances (e.g. tobacco and alcohol).  

Opportunities for learning: This project represents a great opportunity to work on a large longitudinal population-based cohort. The student will be closely supervised and have the opportunity to learn R software and advanced statistical modelling such as structural equation modelling, which will constitute an extremely valuable long-term asset.

Details

Acute cognitive and psychological responses following substance use

The project will involve designing an online survey project assessing the acute cognitive and psychological effects following substance use in the general population. The aim of the survey is to obtain more detailed assessments on subjective experiences following the use of different psychoactive substances, such as alcohol, nicotine, cannabis and other illicit substances. The students will be involved in the design of the survey, the data collection and the analysis of the survey data, with the opportunity to tailor the content of the survey depending on their interests. The students will be working collaboratively with other researchers from lab that are involved in the survey and will be supervised by Dr Jean-Baptiste Pingault and Dr Tabea Schoeler throughout the different parts of the project.

Possible research questions could include:
    1. What is the prevalence of acute cognitive impairments (e.g. memory/attention problems) and psychological problems (e.g. mood, psychosis-like) following substance use (e.g. cannabis) in the general population?
    2. Are different patterns of substance use (e.g. for cannabis: route of use, type of cannabis used) associated with individual differences in cognitive and psychological responses to the substance?
    3. Do the acute effects of a particular substance depend on individual factors, such as gender, age, personality or history of previous substance use (e.g. age of onset, comorbid use of other drugs)?

Details

In collaboration with Francesca Bonalumi (Central European University) and Johannes Mahr (Central European University)

Communication relies on trust and we expect speakers to be committed to what they say. Yet, what is expressed in conversion is not always conveyed literally and pragmatic phenomena where the meaning of an utterance is contextually adjusted are the norm rather than the exception. Think, for instance, of:
-	Everyone (in our group) will go to the party!
-	I don’t know where to put the flowers, the vase fell on the floor (and broke).
-	Of course, she will help she’s an angel (a kind human)! 
Recently some studies started looking at how speakers infer speaker commitment; commitment appears to be modulated by meaning relations (e.g., saying, presupposing, implicating) and speakers are taken to be less committed to a message communicated implicitly (Mazzarella, Reinecke, Noveck & Mercier, 2018). This project uses web-based questionnaires to investigate how hearers construe the meaning-commitment relation examining how the meaning conveyed through various pragmatic phenomena is deniable and how accountable the speaker is held for it. 
This project involves setting up on-line questionnaires for adult participants.

Suggested readings:
Doran, R., Ward, G., Larson, M., McNabb, Y., & Baker, R. E. (2012). A novel experimental paradigm for distinguishing between what is said and what is implicated. Language, 88(1), 124-154. 
Lee, J. J., & Pinker, S. (2010). Rationales for indirect speech: The theory of the strategic speaker. Psychological review 117(3), 785-807. 
Mazzarella, D., Reinecke, R., Noveck, I. & Mercier, H. (2018). Saying, presupposing and implicating: How pragmatics modulates commitment. Journal of Pragmatics, 133: 15-27.

Details

Comprehension of figurative language requires both linguistic and non-linguistic skills. It is documented to be fairly poor in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), but suspected to be unproblematic in Down syndrome (DS). This study is the first to investigate comprehension of novel (rather than previously researched conventional) metaphors in these populations, thereby providing a more detailed picture of their pragmatic competence relative to their general linguistic and cognitive abilities. To determine where the difficulties arise - insufficient vocabulary knowledge, incapacity to take into account the context or interference of the literal meaning - we will use two methods recently developed for very young typical children, which minimise the cognitive demands involved in the process of metaphor comprehension, while still being suitable to populations with compromised intellectual and linguistic aptitudes such as ASD and DS. 

Student who wish to work with typically developing children – and possibly ASD children or children with Down syndrome – can contact us.

This project has already been approved by the ethics committee. This project involves working with young children so students who are interested should apply for an enhanced DBS check.

Details

I would be interested in offering projects for students interested in social behaviour or decision making in a social context. 

Humans are among the most cooperative species on the planet- we regularly go out of our way to help others, even people we have never met or do not expect to meet in the future. I am interested in what prompts this pro social behaviour. At the same time, we can also ask under what conditions humans become less pro social and more self centred. The projects I would supervise would also be suitable for students with an interest in behaviour change, behavioural economics or evolution of behaviour.  Some of the recent research we have been working on also looks at how personality traits such as psychopathy and paranoia affect social cognition and behaviour. 

We are an open science lab and are striving to pre-register all experiments where possible. Students working in my lab are typically expected to produce a piece of publishable research (and to be involved in the production of the peer-reviewed article, from inception to publication). 

Students interested in working with the Social Evolution & Behaviour Lab should visit our webpage, http://seb-lab.org, to learn more about our research interests and current projects, and to come up with ideas for a research project.

Details

Clinically-Related Projects Currently Available for Postgraduate Students (Sept. 2016) 
All projects designed and supervised by Dr David Raune (Clinical Psychologist, Early Intervention in Psychosis Service, CNWL), with Dr Julianna Onwumere (Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, IOPPN) supervising the paper-writing stage. All data is already collected. Students need to be able to attend The Pembroke Centre in Ruislip Manor (HA48NQ) for Supervision weekly or fortnightly and stay involved with the project until the paper is accepted for publication. 

1) Test of the cognitive model of caring in early course psychosis (N=100+). We have 50+ pairs (N=100+) of early course psychosis carers psychological need assessments (key illness beliefs, subjective burden, depression, anxiety, coping, burnout, positive experiences) on the same patient with two carers (e.g. Mother and Father). This opportunity permits a simple yet unique test of the cognitive model of caregiving: Which carer outcomes are the same and which are different when caring for the same psychosis patient? The results relate to theoretical models of carers psychological needs and early clinical interventions to reduce those needs and enhance carers well-being. All data is already inputted to SPSS. 

2) Predictors of early course psychosis carers psychological experiences (N=225+). The project is to test - in the largest sample to date - demographic, social and psychological predictors of carers early psychological needs and positive exigencies. The results relate to theoretical models of carers psychological experiences and identifying which early course carer-patient duos should be prioritised for intervention. All data is already inputted to SPSS. 

3) Pilot study of cognitive group psychoeducation for early course psychosis carers (N=20): Early course psychosis carers key beliefs about psychosis are influential in their own and psychosis patients mental health. We tested if a Single-Session of a specifically devised new syllabus of cognitive group psychoeducation could improve carers key illness beliefs. We will also compare the results to a three-session intervention format we ran and presented at the 2015 BABCP conference (N=149, Onwumere et al, submitted).  If the results are positive then the format could be tested in larger more rigorous design and perhaps rolled out in Early Intervention in Psychosis services as an effective yet economically viable intervention for the thousands of new psychosis carers each year. Data needs to be inputted to SPSS. 

4) Structure of early course psychosis carers psychological experiences (N=225+). 
The project is to identify the structure - for example the severity, spread and interconnectedness - of new carers negative and positive psychological experiences. For example, are psychological needs spread evenly across carers or does there exist a subgroup who are multiply afflicted? Results relate to theoretical models of carers and the identification of needs in carers and carers in need. All data is already inputted into SPSS. 

Dr David Raune, Clinical Psychologist, Early Intervention in Psychosis Service, CNWL Foundation Trust, The Pembroke Centre, 90 Pembroke Road, Ruislip Manor, London HA48NQ. Email: david.raune@nhs.net. telephone: 07851428916.

Details

We will compare data quality in three classic experimental tasks across various software platforms and subject pools

Details

Project will involve collaborating with the National Lottery (their Behavioral Science unit)

Details

This project will investigate the hypothesis that inverted faces are processed by domain-general (object) recognition mechanisms, whereas only upright faces are processed by face-specific mechanisms.

Details

Some researchers argue that familiar and unfamiliar faces are processed by different mechanisms. This project will investigate the role of facial expressions and impressions (e.g. trustworthiness) in the recognition of unfamiliar faces

Details

This project will build on an MSc research project from last year - we will examine the factors that can promote/hinder trust in medical decisions reached by AI

Details

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a disorder characterised by lifelong impairment in face recognition. Past remedial training attempts were one-fits-all programs that showed limited success in improving face perception in individuals with DP. The aim is to develop a novel training paradigm based on the idea that different perceptual deficits can lead to prosopagnosia. The project would have two parts: 1) identify the various types of perceptual deficits behind prosopagnosia; 2) build remedial training for each type of prosopagnosia. Strong programming skills and knowledge of principal component analysis highly desirable.

Details

Recent evidence has suggested that very large inversion effects may be obtained with highly homogeneous cars, not only with faces. This project will investigate if the findings generalise to other non-face stimuli and aim to identify the properties needed to produce large (face-like) inversion effects.

Details

Why do people gather together, sometimes at great cost and inconvenience, to experience live performances of music, drama, dance and education? Technology can deliver a rich perceptual experience to the home or a mobile device. Yet more people watch live artistic performances in the UK than watch all live sports combined. In universities, we still gather together for lectures, when there is the option to watching lecturecast recordings at home. 

Our aim is uncover the psychological consequences of these experiences, from the perspective of both the audience and the performer. Using sensors to detect motion, heart rate and skin conductance, we will map physiological signals onto phenomenology of being engaged in the performance as a spectator; or the or feeling of connecting with the audience as a performer. We will test the hypothesis that engagement in a live performance is related to synchrony between audience members' collective physiology, and it the experience of this synchrony that is absent in recorded performance. We see if the same psychology explains why people still prefer live lectures, and whether there is a learning advantage to attending a live lecture.

Details

Collective acts of societal self-harm, ranging from littering to rioting, have been studied extensively from a sociological and political perspective, but it has proved difficult to investigate them from a psychological perspective because of the practical challenges involved in experimentally manipulating the behaviour of a large number of individuals interacting in real time. This project will develop a mass participation game, Parklife, that can be played online or amongst large groups of people, in which teams of players can develop or vandalise a virtual park. By engaging hundreds of people and manipulating factors within the game - shown by previous research to drive societal self- harm - the researchers aim to produce causal experimental evidence that will complement existing scholarship and make an important contribution to the ongoing policy debate on the effects of social inequality.

Details

We study the neurobiology of adaptive and pathological anxiety. Three project areas:
 
1) The impact of selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) on the neural and computational mechanisms of anxiety:
-will require working with and recruiting from clinical populations
-will require working in fMRI environment
2) The impact of threat of shock induced anxoety on approach and withdrawal responses in healthy humans:
-requires ability to (learn to) code up your own tasks
3) Reliability of measures of anxiety and cognition
-test retest of a currently programmed cognitive task battery
 
If you are interested please contact Oliver Robinson (o.robinson@ucl.ac.uk)

Details

BACKGROUND
Fluent communication requires sophisticated, flexible knowledge about what words mean and how they can be used in different linguistic contexts. Individuals vary widely in the quality of their vocabulary knowledge. Poor vocabulary knowledge is strongly associated with poor performance on general measures of communication skill, and has substantial, life-long impact, in terms of academic attainment and occupational status. Evidence-based methods for improving vocabulary learning across the lifespan can potentially increase social mobility and narrow the gap between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers, but the success of such interventions relies on the use of effective, appropriate screening tests to accurately measure vocabulary knowledge at different ages.

AIM
The aim of this project is to develop fun, engaging child-friendly web-based tests of vocabulary knowledge. Potential methods will likely be piloted using adult participants to assess their validity. The challenge will be to develop a method that is suitable for a range of types of words and that can be adapted for use in pre-readers.

Details

BACKGROUND
We must often learn new meanings for words we already know, for example due to language evolving (e.g., the social media meanings of ‘tweet’ and ‘troll’) or starting a new hobby (e.g., the sailing meaning of ‘boom’). New word meanings are normally acquired incidentally by deriving them from context when reading/listening, rather than through intentional memorisation of definitions. Research on this topic has focused on monolinguals, and has revealed that learning new word meanings is much better when these meanings are related to the word’s existing meaning. 
AIM
This project will explore new word-meaning learning in bilingual participants. Specifically, it will determine whether bilingual participants are influenced by their knowledge of their mother tongue when learning new words in their second language. Bilingual participants will read short stories in their second language that containing new meanings for words that already exist either in their first or second language. Participants’ learning will be measured through tests of cued recall of the new meanings for the known words. The specific impact of their knowledge of their first language will be assessed by comparing their performance to a group of monolingual participants. 

This project is ideally suited to students with a good knowledge of a language that has similar spelling patterns to English (e.g., Dutch, German).

Details

BACKGROUND
Despite widespread acceptance that implicit learning from natural linguistic environments (e.g., conversations, books, TV) is the main source of vocabulary learning, most experiments use highly artificial stimuli, tasks and learning conditions. The current project focuses exclusively on learning from naturally occurring linguistic stimuli, i.e. stimuli that are not created by the experimenters and that could be encountered in everyday life.  Attempts to boost children’s language skills currently tend to highlight the importance of reading. Very significant money and time are expended by teachers and parents in encouraging reluctant readers to read. Perhaps surprisingly little is known about the specific benefits for vocabulary development of reading relative to other story formats. 
AIM
The aim of this project is to observe how word learning is influenced by the format in which the stories are presented. Books like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series provide an ideal opportunity to observe vocabulary learning ‘in the wild’ – when readers encounter words like “muggle” and “quidditch” they have no prior knowledge of these words and so any observed learning can directly be attributed to their experience within the novels. However these books are now too widely read to be suitable for experiments, so for this project it will be necessary to select a different, less widely read book to be used as the core material. Adult participants will be randomly assigned to three conditions: paper book reading, electronic book reading, audio book listening. Participants will be asked to record how much time they spend reading the book and their reading progress (measured in chapters). Web-based vocabulary tests will be conducted as readers near the end of the book designed to monitor their learning of new words (e.g., “muggle”) to see if there are differences in how quickly/effectively people have learned words from the different formats.

Details

Stuart Rosen 
stuart@phon.ucl.ac.uk 

1/ Assessing talker intelligibility 
There is much current interest in the question of why some talkers are easier to understand than others. In this project, we will try to take a new approach to assessing talker intelligibility by determining which talkers are most intelligible when they are masked by a similar sentence spoken by other talkers, and by themselves. An important part of the project will be obtaining appropriate recordings from up to a dozen talkers who can then be assessed for intelligibility.

2/ Learning to understand rotated speech: the role of intonation (with Tim Green)
There is currently much interest in the degree to which listeners can adapt to speech that has been transformed or distorted in some way, not least because this has obvious implications for users of hearing aids and cochlear implants. One particular question concerns the extent to which a natural intonation pattern could help in adapting to a distortion, even though the intonation itself contributes relatively little to the intelligibility of speech overall. In this study we will use rotated speech, in which the high frequencies are mapped to the low and vice versa. Although unintelligible at first, listeners have been shown to be able to learn to understand rotated speech, although it is a difficult task. In this study, we will compare the extent to which normal listeners can adapt to rotated speech when they are trained either with speech materials that have a natural intonation contour, or ones in which the intonation contour has been flattened artificially.

3/ Understanding sine-wave speech
There is currently much interest in listeners' abilities to understand speech that has been degraded in various ways. Much has been written about the perception of sine-wave speech (SWS) in which the formants of speech are replaced by sine waves varying in frequency and amplitude. Although these sounds have an odd bird-like quality, much of them can be understood when people are told they are speech. In this project, we will explore the extent to which SWS (and various transformations of it which change the quality of the sound, but not the information in it) are recognised and understood by naive listeners. This project would be ideal for someone interested in basic theories of speech perception. No special technical knowledge is necessary.

Details

Understanding how the brain processes visual images is a fundamental question in neuroscience. As we constantly move around in the world, changes in the visual scene are largely generated by our own movements. This is particularly true for visual features related to motion and flow, and our perception of speed can be altered by movement. In this project, we will investigate movement-dependent changes in speed perception, using visual psychophysics with head-mounted displays.

Details

Attachment preferences in Processing English Sentences. 
 There has been a long literature about differences in attachment preferences across languages for sentences like "Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony”. The relative clause "who was on the balcony" can either modify "the actress" or "the servant". Most English speakers prefer to attach low (ie, to modify the actress).  In other languages (eg, Spanish), there is a preference for high attachment.  These results have led to the undesirable conclusion that there are different parsing preferences across languages.  Recently Grillo (2012) has pointed out that these diffrences in preference may relate to differences in the syntax across these languages.  The project offered would be to test this theory in English through a questionnaire and (possibly) a self-paced reading study.

Details

Passives in cross-modal lexical priming.  

There have been many theoretical accounts of the syntactic structure of passives ('Mary was kissed by Bill') where Mary is the subject of the sentence but the one undergoing the action (but not the agent). Previous work on the processing of these structures found that while they appear to be more complex than active sentences (Bill kissed Mary) on a number of offline measures, the online results provide a different picture. To clarify this issue, we offer a project that will use the Cross Modal Lexical Priming technique while correcting for some potential problems with the stimuli and methods of previous studies.

Details

Anne Schlottmann,  Experimental Psychology, UCL,   a.schlottmann@ucl.ac.uk 

I work on typical cognitive development in children, mostly on children’s reasoning, and I also work on causal reasoning and perception in adults, as well as children. I am happy to supervise projects with both children and adults in 1819.  Below you find some more specific ideas and areas for projects.

(1) YOUNG CHILDREN’S  UNDERSTANDING OF MATERIALS/SUBSTANCES, THEIR “INTUITIVE CHEMISTRY”: We know a lot about children’s intuitive physics, psychology, biology, but very little is known about their intuitive chemistry, their understanding of the materials and substances of which the objects/bodies in their world are composed.  I am particularly interested in children’s understanding of mixing of substances, e.g., when solid and liquid mix,  the solid may dissolve,  or there may just be a suspension, or there may be a reaction.  Chemistry teaching only starts in key stage 2, but I investigate primary school children’s natural understanding of such phenomena, which traditionally are believed to be beyond young children.  We have already found that even 5-year-olds can understand dissolving (Hill, Schlottmann, Ellefson, Taber, Tse, & Yung, 2014) and even simple chemical reactions and I’d be very keen to take on students to explore this further.  

Chemistry A level might be helpful, but not required, as this is really simple “pre-chemistry”, though you should have enjoyed your GCSE chemistry especially the practical aspects. This year I’d like to study, for example, whether and how children understand that if I mix 1 cup of red, hot, sweet juice with another cup of red, hot, sweet juice, I end up with 2 cups of juice, but the juice is not twice as red, hot or sweet. Previous research suggests children have extreme difficulties with this (Stavy et al., 1982; Dixon & Moore, 1991; Jaeger & Wilkening, 2001), but our own research suggests a different picture.

(2)  CHILDREN’S IDEAS OF FAIRNESS IN TEAMS:  I’d also be keen for a student to work on a social cognition project jointly supervised with Karla Koskuba and David Lagnado to look at how children assign “fair” reward and responsibility for an outcome jointly produced by members of a team to these team members. This follows up on Gerstenberg & Lagnado’s (2010) study on responsibility attribution in adults, but our initial study with children found quite a different picture for reward distribution (Koskuba, Gerstenberg, Gordon, Lagnado, & Schlottmann, 2018). New studies will investigate the discrepancy, considering how what children think is a fair reward links to their view of the causal role the individual played in producing the outcome. This project can be seen as a look at the emergence of children’s “natural” morals.  

(3) I AM ALSO INTERESTED IN JUDGEMENT-DECISION STUDIES WITH CHILDREN: For the general approach, see Schlottmann & Wilkening (2011). There are multiple topics I would like to study here, for instance, the study of children’s understanding of skill-related uncertainty in motor and cognitive tasks, or their understanding of everyday risks in health, traffic, school, or other everyday situations in which children encounter uncertainty and probability. This is in contrast to the standard gambling tasks of the JDM literature, which are far removed from everyday experience. I am also interested in the relation between children’s choices and their judgments -- children typically are far better at judging their options than at making decisions between them.   Or I am interested in projects studying biases in children’s decision-making and how they may be overcome, or in cross-cultural study of the development of judgment and decision-making.   

(4)  PERCEPTION OF CAUSALITY: These are studies co-supervised with Christos Bechlivanidis.  See next project

Some of my papers on various topics are at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/cogdev

Please note that projects with children need to be planned in advance, so speak to me now about the practicalities, do not wait until December, as it does take a bit of time to find schools in which to test children, get permission from parents etc. If you already have a connection (your old school, the school/youth group in which you volunteered etc) this helps!  You should be a fluent speaker of UK English if you plan on testing children here, and if English is your 2nd language, you might also consider testing children in your home country instead. In this case you may have to get local permissions and ethics approval (e.g., Singapore students have to go through the Singapore Ministry of Education.)  If testing in the UK, you will need an advanced DBS (Disclosure and barring service) check, which may take some weeks ( http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hr/docs/working_with_children.php)  We will give support, training and advice at all stages,  but these prelimininaries can take a while.  If this puts you off, do also consider that at the end you have not only a research project but also much valuable experience of working in an institution and of working with children, which may be helpful for the next step in your career.

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Anne Schlottmann & Christos Bechlivanidis,  Experimental Psychology, UCL,   a.schlottmann@ucl.ac.uk,  c.bechlivanidis@ucl.ac.uk

We share an interest in in causal reasoning and perception and would be happy to co-supervise students in this area,  either conducting online studies with adults or person-to-person studies with children. We have two current sets of projects:

1)	PERCEPTUAL CAUSALITY IN COMPLEX ENVIRONMENTS:  This line of work extends the approach pioneered in Michotte's famous studies of perceptual causality (Michotte, 1963). Michotte argued that sometimes, causality can be seen directly, and is essentially a Gestalt property of certain motion sequences. Michotte’s approach is so attractive because it explains how humans (including babies from birth) can be sensitive to simple forms of causality, when 2000 years of philosophy has not led to much agreement even on how to define the concept. Here we focus on the argument that perceptual causality could help us parse the event stream to determine the causal structure of our complex environment, without requiring much reasoning or problem-solving. This is an attractive claim, yet there are no data,  as virtually all studies involve only two objects moving on similar paths in otherwise empty space.  Here, we extend study to situations involving many moving objects on multiple trajectories, which is closer to the real world. In the simplest paradigm, we consider how causality judgments in such a complex world might differ (or not) from that in a two object environment. Another approach is to consider visual search for causality in such complex worlds, to explore whether perceptual causality confers advantages for attention.

2)	CAUSALITY IN UNREALISTIC EVENTS:  According to all relevant psychological theories,  we should only consider a perceived sequence of events as causal if it (more or less) conforms to what is real or at least possible.  Yet, this makes causal learning of genuinely new relations very difficult. It would also not seem to fit with our willingness to accept unrealistic forms of causality in movies or in magic shows, despite knowledge that this is not real-life causality. We have already done a series of studies showing that adults are very happy to treat various animated, unrealistic events (treated as non-causal in the Michotte literature) as causal on initial encounter – the events are re-evaluated and become non-causal only if there are repeated encounters that allow comparison to a more standard, realistic causal event,  but prior to such comparison people entertain a quite wide range of unrealistic causal hypotheses.  We would now like to extend the approach to look at people’s reaction to magic and to photo-realistic events “that should not be”.   This project requires students who are either magicians,  or who have very good video-editing skills, to produce the unrealistic events for testing.

3)	BOTH PROJECTS COULD ALSO BE ADAPTED FOR WORK WITH CHILDREN.

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I have developed a questionnaire to look at people's perceptions of laughter, and I would like to collect some data on whether this  translates into real differences in how people laugh/perceive laughter

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Investigating the perception of laughter from video footage

Especially suitable for Social Cognition students

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Looking at the kinds of information  people use when deciding if a word is a real word or not

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There is much evidence that sleep aids memory consolidation but this research is the subject of ongoing controversy. This project will adapt a procedure devised by Mazza et al. (2016) to provide a strong test of the sleep consolidation hypothesis.

Mazza, S., Gerbier, E., Gustin, M.-P., Kasikci, Z., Koenig, O., Toppino, T. C., & Magnin, M. (2016). Relearn faster and retain longer: Along with practice, sleep makes perfect. Psychological Science, 27, 1321–1330.

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Famously, Tversky and Kahneman (1974) showed that decision makers bias their estimates of unknown quantities in the direction of a salient numerical anchor. Standard anchoring paradigms have been shown to yield pervasive biases, such as a 2-step task which includes a comparative question followed by an estimation question. In contrast there is much less evidence for the claim that incidental environmental anchors can produce assimilative effects on judgments, such as the amount people are willing to pay for a meal being greater at a restaurant called Studio 97 compared to one called Studio 17. This project will involve setting up a large-sample preregistered replication of the incidental environmental anchoring study by Critcher and Gilovich (2008). 

Critcher, C. R., & Gilovich, T. (2008). Incidental environmental anchors. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 21, 241-251.

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This project will address the question of whether people can detect regularities in their environment and adapt their behaviour accordingly in the absence of awareness (consciousness). The contextual cuing effect shows that search times for targets hidden amongst distractors are faster when the same search displays are repeated compared to when they are randomly drawn anew. Although the effect is undebatable, it remains an open question whether participants are able to consciously recognise the repeated search displays. Vadillo, Konstantinidis, and Shanks (2016) recently suggested that this line of research suffers from a high probability of false-negative results on the recognition (awareness) test as well as from misinterpreting weak relationships between search times and recognition performance. Colagiuri and Livesey (2016) increased the sample size and argued that the data still support the absence of a positive relationship between search times and recognition performance. However, they ignored the problem that the measures’ unreliability will bias the relationship between them. In a new study, we will collect data that allow us to calculate reliability indices and test whether the absence of a positive relationship persists.

Colagiuri, B., & Livesey, E. J. (2016). Contextual cuing as a form of nonconscious learning: Theoretical and empirical analysis in large and very large samples. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23, 1996–2009.

Vadillo, M. A., Konstantinidis, E., & Shanks, D. R. (2016). Underpowered samples, false negatives, and unconscious learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23, 87–102.

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Project 1:

This project will tackle the question of whether there can be source memory in the absence of item memory. In a recent study, Malejka and Bröder (2016) showed that source memory for unrecognized items is most likely an artefact of implicit feedback. When the source question follows all OLD responses and NEW responses to old items (conditional test; Starns et al., 2008), participants know when a NEW response is incorrect and can make a correct source judgment. Malejka and Bröder (2016) asked the source question after every item response and thus no feedback was provided (unconditional test). Although the apparent effect of source memory for unrecognized items disappeared, it remains debatable whether participants in the latter task are motivated enough to provide source judgments to items they think are new. Only when new items have a source will responses to all questions actually be meaningful. In a new study, we will design new items that have a source, which should increase participants’ motivation to provide source judgments after responding NEW.

Malejka, S., & Bröder, A. (2016). No source memory for unrecognized items when implicit feedback is avoided. Memory & Cognition, 44, 63–72.

Starns, J. J., Hicks, J. L., Brown, N. L., & Martin, B. A. (2008). Source memory for unrecognized items: Predictions from multivariate signal detection theory. Memory & Cognition, 36, 1–8.

Project 2:

This project will address the question of whether there can be source memory in the absence of item memory. In a recent study, Chen, Gomes, and Brainerd (in press) showed that people can apparently remember the list an item appeared in without remembering that they have seen the item before. In the study phase, items studied on two different lists (e.g., List 1: apple, orange, banana, horse; List 2: dog, cat, mouse, strawberry) were either consistent with the list’s taxonomic category (e.g., apple in a list of fruits) or inconsistent (e.g., horse in a list of fruits). In the test phase, source memory for the list was better but item memory was worse when the tested item’s category was consistent with other words from the list. However, participants in Chen et al.’s (in press) experiments were well aware of the different categories, such that classifying an item they mistakenly think is new as originating from the list that included many words from that category is simply a rational response bias. In a new study, we will test whether the finding stands or falls with participants’ response bias by using other source details than taxonomic categories.

Chen, X. R., Gomes, C. F. A., & Brainerd, C. J. (in press). Explaining recollection without remembering. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

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Information Seeking and Psychopathology

How do people decide what they want to know? And do those decisions give us clues about people’s mental health? The current project aims to investigate whether information-seeking paterns predict latent psychopathology conditions and affective states. 

For related work please read our previous paper on this topic http://affectivebrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Valuation-of-knowledge-and-ignorance.pdf 

Primary supervisor: Professor Tali Sharot
Contact: Joseph Marks joseph.marks.14@ucl.ac.uk

Student suitability

Priority will be given to students who have:
1.	Background in cognitive science, neuroeconomics, decision-making or social/cognitive/affective neuroscience
2.	Experience programming in Matlab (or other programming languages), computational modeling

About the Affective Brain Lab

The Affective Brain Lab investigates how affect (the experience of emotion) affects human cognition and behaviour in normal brain function and in affective disorders (such as depression and anxiety).
We study how motivation and emotion (generated in response to an internal thought, external reward and punishment, or social interaction) determine our expectations of the future, our everyday decisions, our memories and our ability to learn. By understanding these basic processes we aim to identify ways to encourage behavioural change that enhance well-being.
Our approach is multidisciplinary; We tackle questions traditionally studied by social psychologists and behavioural economists utilizing brain imaging (fMRI), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), pharmacological manipulations, neuropsychiatric methods, computational models, genetics techniques, and behavioural experiments. We collaborate with psychologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists and behavioural economists worldwide. Our aim is to offer new insight into brain function in both health and disease.
The practical implications are considerable, including policy formulation to correct for human biases as well as clinical applications in the treatment of brain dysfunction.

For more information about the lab, please visit http://affectivebrain.com/

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Research interest: Patient and Public Involvement (PPI), peer researchers, antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), qualitative data collection, male offenders, and the criminal justice system.    

Project supervised by Elizabeth Simes (UCL) supported by Professor Peter Fonagy (UCL).  

Department: Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology (CEHP) 

Background to the study:

Violent crime is associated with a range of negative impacts on health and wider society, and ASPD is a key contributor to violent criminal behaviour. ASPD is significantly overrepresented among offenders and it carries high rates of comorbidity and mortality for individuals, and high risk of harm to the public. The Mentalization for Offending Adult Males (MOAM) trial aims to explore the effectiveness of Mentalization-Based Treatment in reducing aggressive behaviour for offenders with ASPD through a randomised control trial in the national probation service. The trial is funded by the National Institute for Health Research and led by Professor Peter Fonagy at UCL. The study launched in January 2016 and is due to report in December 2020.

It is well documented that the target population for the MOAM trial are hard to reach and often find it difficult to engage with services. The research team therefore decided to adopt the peer researcher approach involving researchers with lived experience of the criminal justice system as it was believed they would be able to access participants and topics that traditional research and service staff may not be able to reach. The peer researchers are currently collecting data for the trial and have been recruited through User Voice (http://www.uservoice.org/) a third sector ex-offender organisation who aim to reduce re-offending through research and engagement work which is led and delivered by ex-offenders. 

The inclusion of researchers with lived experience of the criminal justice system in data collection for a large-scale randomised control trial is new ground for the research team. To date the trial has managed to retain a very high number of participants, and only 2% of the population have dropped out of the study. We have also successfully exceeded our recruitment target. However, there have been other challenges with ensuring peer researchers are adequately trained and supported when meeting with participants in forensic settings. 

This study aims to capture learning and explore the impact of the peer researcher approach on the MOAM trial from the view point of the participants, operational staff and the peer researchers themselves.    

Research questions: 

To examine the impact of the peer researcher approach on the MOAM trial in four key areas
1.	The peer researchers’ experience of collecting data in the criminal justice system.  
2.	The MOAM participants' experience of interacting and disclosing personal information to a peer researcher.
3.	Explore the similarities and differences of the peer researcher approach compared to a participant’s experience of meeting with a traditional research assistant.  
4.	The impact of the involvement of peer researchers on the wider criminal justice system.

Data collection: 

Data will be collected from autumn 2018 – summer 2019. 
The participants are men who meet threshold for ASPD currently under supervision of the national probation service in 13 sites in England and Wales and recruited into the MOAM trial (N=20); offender managers currently supervising the male offenders in 13 sites in England and Wales (N=20); male and female peer researchers currently collecting data for the MOAM trial (N=4) and User Voice operational staff (N=4). 
Data collection will involve completing semi-structured interviews exploring the interviewee’s experience of the peer researcher approach. 

Elizabeth is doing the project for her Research PhD and the MSc students will share data collection with her. The MSc student will be able to choose which aspects of the project they write up. 
Elizabeth is a Trial Coordinator based in the CEHP department and coordinates the MOAM trial. Elizabeth will supervise the day to day data collection for the project supported by Professor Peter Fonagy.

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We are building a device to supplant hearing through the electrotactile stimulation of the mouth. This device is multisensory in that it relies on the interconnectedness of sensory modalities in the brain. Specifically, somatosensory and visual brain systems are known to play an integrated and inseparable role in normal speech perception. We will, therefore, evaluate the ability of participants to ‘hear’ speech sounds presented to an electrode array mounted in the mouth (making use of the somatosensory system) while simultaneously seeing a talker producing that speech (making use of the visual system). Can participants use these sensory systems to interface with typical auditory processing mechanisms to understand speech? We will begin to experimentally address this question by testing whether hearing participants experience the classic ‘McGurk-MacDonald effect’ with our device. This is an auditory perceptual illusion in which, under normal conditions, participants experience hearing, for example, a ‘ta’ when an auditory ‘pa’ is dubbed onto a visual ‘ka’. We will also test two different algorithms for presenting auditory information to the electrode array in the mouth. There is room for other projects. For example, we might train people to perceive speech on the device using auditorily and audiovisually presented sentences and test speed of learning and generalization to new sentences. If it works, the device might be of assistance to the 328 million adults worldwide who acquire disabling hearing loss. 

See http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/M026965/1 for some more details related to the device we are building.

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Many universities present themselves as being pro-environmental and ask staff and students to adopt eco-friendly behaviours, like recycling and taking the stairs, to do their part.  Many of these same universities, however, invest heavily in fossil fuel companies and intermediaries that are a leading cause of environmental devastation and global warming (e.g., UCL invests about £21 million in these companies). Our recent research suggests that this discrepancy between universities explicit attitudes, e.g., as seen on websites, and their implicit attitudes toward the environment, e.g., as revealed by their investment strategies, negatively impact staff and students intentions to adoption of pro-environmental behaviours (www.lab-lab.org/research/green-ucl). We would like to extend this work by conducting further studies to experimentally test this hypothesis using measures of actual pro-environmental behaviours.  
 
Please email Jeremy Skipper (jskipper@lab-lab.org) for further details or to arrange an initial meeting.
 
Supervisor:
Dr Jeremy I Skipper (in collaboration with Adam Harris)

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How much do nonverbal cues really contribute to language understanding? (Co-supervisor: David Vinson)

Speech is often accompanied by ‘nonverbal’ communicative cues. A long and rich history of behavioral research shows that we typically make use of those cues when they are available. For example, observable mouth movements, head movements, and co-speech gestures have all been individually shown to improve speech perception or language comprehension.  What we do not know, however, is whether, when and how listeners use each of those cues when they are all simultaneously available (as they would be in natural face-to-face situations). To begin to address this question we will test the hypothesis that the contribution of nonverbal cues to understanding is a weighted function of the prior semantic informativeness of the speech signal and individual nonverbal cues themselves. For example, one could imagine that a co-speech gesture might contribute more to our momentary understanding than a speech-associated mouth movement when that gesture is iconic (versus a less semantically informative gesture) and when it begins well in advance of the word(s) described by that gesture (as in natural speech). In this project we will develop a new method to analyse video for the informativeness of different nonverbal cues. We might have participants verbally shadow a recorded television game show that contains natural dialogue and nonverbal cues. We can present the video intact or blur out individual nonverbal cues with the expectation that shadowing times should change as a function of the informativeness of each channel, allowing us to reconstruct the dynamic contribution of any one channel with respect to the intact video. Alternatively, we might develop metrics for measuring informativeness of nonverbal cues in video in a similar manner but with continuous ratings using a joystick.

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Supervisor name: Dr Samuel Solomon
Affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology 
Email: s.solomon@ucl.ac.uk 
Website: http://solomonlab.info
Project Title: Instinctive visual decisions in mice

Project Details: Our laboratory aims to understand how neurons in the visual pathway provide information that can be used to guide rapid action. Our work focuses on mice, using techniques that include multi-electrode recordings and imaging in combination with innate and learned visually-guided behaviours. The proposed project below indicates the line of work we are interested in studying with MSc CoDeS students. We are happy to discuss alternative behavioural projects along similar lines. Depending on capacity and interest, the student may also participate in parallel electrophysiological recordings from key areas of the mouse brain.In the example project the student will establish how mice decide where to seek refuge during potential threat. This would involve video-tracking of mouse movements in custom-made open environments, during and after presentation of overhead visual stimuli. The first question is if mice use the location of sudden overhead threats to direct their choice of escape direction. The second question is if prior cueing of mice to the likely location of overhead threats improves their decision-making.These projects require some computational skill (the analyses are primarily in Matlab) and prior computational experience would be beneficial. The results of these experiments will inform us of whether mice naturally use vision to instruct decisions, and guide experiments in to understanding the neural mechanisms that allow this.

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While multiple systems models are popular in cognition, there is still a lot of debate about the merits of such models compared to single systems models. An influential theory on category learning proposes a competition between a rule-based (explicit, verbal) system, and a similarity-based (implicit, procedural) system. Most of the evidence for such a view rests on comparing performance between different tasks in which the underlying category structure either conforms to a simple rule or not. While the results are compatible with the existence of multiple category learning systems, an important prediction remains untested, namely that people switch between relying mainly on one or the other system. The objective of this project is to test this hypothesis by gradually shifting the underlying category structure from a rule-based to a non-rule based representation, and back again. This will allow us to assess (1) whether one person can indeed switch between different systems, and (2) whether there is evidence of hysteresis, one of the key “flags” for the existence of qualitatively different, competing systems. Potentially, we could extend this paradigm to the reinforcement learning domain,

Initial readings: 
Ell, S.W., & Ashby, F.G. (2006). The effects of category overlap on information-integration and rule-based category learning. Perception & Psychophysics, 68, 1013-1026. 
Visser, I., & Speekenbrink, M. (2014). It's a Catastrophe! Testing dynamics between competing cognitive states using mixture and hidden Markov models. Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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In interpersonal games, such as poker, we can learn about the strategies of our opponents and match our behaviour accordingly. Traditionally, game theory has ignored such learning or opponent modelling. Allowing for learning in games can potentially make strategic behaviour more complex, as you actions will not only affect who wins the game, but also how much your opponent(s) can learn about you strategy. The objective of this project is to investigate whether and how people learn the strategies of their opponents in simple repeated games with either simulated (computer) opponents, or real opponents.

Initial readings:
Camerer, C. F., & Ho, T. H. (2015). Behavioral game theory, experiments and modeling. Handbook of game theory, 4, 517-574.
Erev, I. & Roth, A.E. (1998) Predicting how people play games: Reinforcement learning in strategic games. American Economic Review, 88, 848-881.

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My research interests include learning and decision making, particularly in changing and
dynamic environments. How do people learn to adapt their decision-making strategies to
changing demands and preferences? How do we select the sources of information to consult in
order to support our decision making? How do we integrate different sources of information in
our decision making? In my lab, we use a combination of behavioural experiments and
computational modelling to answer these questions. You can find more information and some
background reading at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/speekenbrink-lab/. I'm generally happy to supervise interesting projects related to these issues, so if you have a good idea, we can discuss this.

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Navigation, the ability to find ways to get from one place to another, is one of our oldest and most vital skills that humans possess. Even though GPS and technology have rapidly replaced a lot of route planning in a new and often complex environment, we still use our navigation skills on a daily base, especially when we need to get around in a familiar environment. In this context, London taxi drivers possess unique skills: Their knowledge of >25,000 streets and places in London enables them to plan complex routes between any two points purely based on their memory.

In this project we intend to test this knowledge to see how the environment (e.g. street layout, street sizes, turns, etc.) affects route planning of taxi drivers. The experiment will include data collection on a tablet, as well as verbal data from short interviews with taxi drivers.
We are looking for a motivated student, who will be involved in planning, data collection and data analysis in this project.
 
Required skills:
 
Basic Statistics (SPSS, Excel) and good communication skills are required. Additional skills that would be useful for this project, include some experience in interviewing and programming (Python, Matlab). Even though these skills are not a must, the willingness to acquire these skills is.

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For pro-environmental behaviours to have a tangible impact, a single person’s engagement is not enough; rather, individuals need to coordinate their efforts. We are interested in how people coordinate, i.e. specifically how evidence of other people’s behaviour (so-called ‘behavioural traces’) influences individual behaviour.

The effect of behavioural traces has been observed for littering behaviour (Cialdini et al., 1990, Study 1), donations (Jacobs et al., 2018), and the spread of solar panel use (Baranzini et al., 2017), amongst others. We use the theory of stigmergy (Heylighen, 2016) to test specific aspects of behavioural traces and their impact on individual pro-environmental behaviours.

So far we have looked at effects of stigmergic coordination for donation and recycling behaviours as well as designed a computer game that emulates small world climate change based on game theory. Projects in any of these and related areas are welcome.

Initial readings:
Heylighen, F. (2016). Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism I: Definition and components. Cognitive Systems Research, 38, 50–59.

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Conviction narrative theory (CNT) is a new framework being developed at UCL to expand psychological understanding and research to decision-making in radical uncertainty. 
Several projects are available - their common theme is that they look at the facilitating role of emotion and narratives and/or that they explore uncertainty - i.e. looking at experimental situations where the subject does not have a 'correct'answer. Some of the work looks at how to measure emotion in narratives and can be applied to risk detection or efforts to forecast the economy. These projects will often be run jointly with Dr David Vinson) Institute for Multimodal Communication) , Dr Rickard Nyman (Computer Science), or Dr Sam Johnson (Cognitive science).

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see the attached file for more details.
The student is expected to participate in designing the experiment (e.g. stimulus selection), and, as a bonus, will learn the event-related potential technique.

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The role of perceptual load in audiovisual speech integration: A behavioural and event-related potential study 

It has been convincingly established that top-down effects, such as perceptual set (Tuomainen et al. 2005, Eskelund et al. 2013) and visual selective attention (e.g. Alsius & Navarra, 2011) affect integration of seen and heard speech. These results suggest that attention is a necessary condition for successful audio-visual speech integration. Less is known about the mechanisms how selective attention affects the integration process. One options is that perceptual load (Lavie & Tsal, 1995) modulates the employment of attentional resources.  We suggest a project in which the level of perceptual load is manipulated while participants are engaged in a (modified) visual flanker task, and the integration process is measured using the well-known McGurk paradigm. We assume that if perceptual load modulates the interaction process then participants will be less susceptible to the McGurk illusion in the high load condition compared to the low load condition. The potential underlying mechanism would involve a reduction in attentional resources to process the mouth movements (the distractor) which in turn will hamper the integration of visual and auditory speech information. We will collect both behavioural and event-related brain potential (ERP) data. The student would be involved in designing the details of the study (especially the ERPs) and will be mainly responsible for collecting and analysing the data. 

This project is supervised by Jyrki Tuomainen (Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences/UCL).

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Projects’ list: Prof Gabriella Vigliocco 
Experimental Psychology, g.vigliocco@ucl.ac.uk

This is a list of projects available in my laboratory for M-level students. Please note that if you work with me, you will be expected to contribute to the life of the lab, including attending weekly lab meetings -- a great opportunity to learn about other research going on and for presenting your work. Working on any of the projects you will contribute to all aspects of design, testing, analysis and writing up. 

Overview
Much of the current research in the lab concentrates on the non-linguistic (often imagistic) information provided by speakers in face-to-face communication, its role in language learning and comprehension and its neural underpinning. This non-linguistic information includes the gestures produced (especially iconic gestures), the intonation (prosody), the use of vocalizations (eg. onomatopoeia) and also the mouth movements that accompany speech. This information is always present in face-to-face communication. However, traditionally it has been largely ignored. But then, why are these features always present in face-to-face communication? Our proposal is that this information is critical in learning and that it also supports online comprehension (see Perniss & Vigliocco, 2014 for overview). 

The projects listed below address the following questions: (1) does the non-linguistic information support learning new words and, critically, new concepts in childhood and adulthood? (2) Does it (and to what extent) support language comprehension? (3) How is it processed in the brain?

Projects 1&2: Learning new words and concepts in childhood and adulthood
Learning new concepts and their labels has been characterised as a hard problem because the label (the object’s name) is argued to be only arbitrarily linked to the object; and because there usually are multiple objects in the visual scene. The problem is, clearly, even harder when the object is not in view. While a number of cues (e.g., shared attention) have been proposed to help children (2-4) learn new objects and labels, very little work has addressed this question for adults. In our work, we have made the novel hypothesis that the multimodal cues available in communication, such as gestures, prosody and onomatopoeias can support learning because they can imagistically bring to mind’s eye features of referents. One completely open question is to what extent these cues are present both in communication with children and adults. Projects 1&2 will use a semi-naturalistic approach and compare interactions between caregiver-child and adult-adult to assess whether/how speakers adjust their language, gestures and prosody depending upon whether the person they are talking to (child or adult) can interact with the objects being labelled or not, and whether the object and the label are novel or not. Project 1 will focus on manual cues such as gestures, but also manipulation of objects; Project 2 will focus on the speech used and the use of prosodic modulation. 

Project 3: The role of gesture and prosody in learning new words in childhood
In Project 3 we will experimentally test whether iconicity (i.e., an imagistic relation between properties of the communication - gestures, prosody – and properties of the referents) facilitates word learning in 2-3 years old children. We compare situations where the referent is visible to the child when the label is produced, to situations where the referent is no longer visible. The experiment will take place in nurseries around London. Students will gain experience designing stimuli, running online experiments using the Gorilla platform, and working with young children (age 2-3 years). 

Project 4: The role of multimodal cues in real-world spoken comprehension
Language is learnt and mostly used in face-to-face contexts where prosody is used to mark new topics of conversation, visible mouth movements can be used to disambiguate the speech, and hand gestures can provide useful information about the meaning of what is being said. However, language studies for the most focus on speech or text only. Moreover, while a few studies have looked at non-linguistic cues such prosody or gesture in isolation, we know virtually nothing about how the brain orchestrate the processing of these multiple cues, especially in real-world interactions. Using EEG, we will investigate how neural responses to complex naturalistic language stimuli are modulated by linguistic context, prosody, mouth movements, and hand gestures. In the project, you will learn about how to use computational modelling to derive probabilistic measures of predictability of words in context; prepare audio-visual materials engaging professional actors; use software for segmentation and prosodic analysis, programme and perform the EEG experiment; analyse the rich multimodal data and write up the report.

Details

Online news articles have increasingly been used as a data source to study how people express emotion and form opinions. Recent events, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal have shed some light onto how people can be influenced by what they read online. In this project we will examine how emotive language expressed in online news articles is interpreted, and the extent to which such language influences people’s opinions. 

In this project the student will run online studies asking participants to read and evaluate selected news articles. For each article, study participants will be asked to identify the entities mentioned in the article that may be ‘influenced’ by what is said in the article, and subsequently rate how strongly the author and reader of the article feels towards the entity.  Possible questions that we might wish to answer is how a reader’s prior beliefs impact their emotional response to the article and the entity, whether the effects vary across different article topics/types (politics, finance, etc.), or whether people can separate their own emotional response from the emotion expressed by the article’s author.    
 
Basic knowledge of statistics and programming in Python are required; The project will involve large datasets (i.e ‘big data’), so experience with databases such as SQL/MongoDB are a plus, though not essential. Background in linguistics is not required, although a project could take a more linguistic focus depending on student interest/expertise.

Please email David Vinson (d.vinson@ucl.ac.uk) for further details or to arrange an initial meeting.

In collaboration with Prof David Tuckett

Details

Measuring implicit mentalizing through eye-tracking

Mentalizing is the ability to represent another person’s mental states (thoughts, beliefs, desires etc.) as distinct from one’s own mental states.  Explicit measures of mentalizing have been used for over 30 years and tend to involve verbal responses justifying people’s actions or explaining what they were thinking (e.g. Baron-Cohen et al., 1985; Happé, 1994).  More recently, implicit measures of mentalizing have been developed (e.g. Senju et al., 2009), although these methods have also been criticized in the literature (e.g. Heyes, 2014).

In this project, you will develop an existing eye-tracking measure of implicit mentalizing to address methodological criticisms, as well as trialing a novel eye-tracking measure of implicit mentalizing.  This project will involve creating video stimuli, programming the task, testing typical adults, processing and analysis of the data, and writing up the final results.

Project supervisor: 
Sarah White
Senior Research Fellow
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL
17 Queen Square
020 7679 1168
s.white@ucl.ac.uk
www.minifish.net

Details

Project title: 'Neural and Computational Processes Underlying Changes in Self-Esteem'

Supervisor: Dr. Geert-Jan Will (Research group: Prof. Ray Dolan)

Background:

Low self-esteem is a core characteristic of many psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and depression. Yet, the neural and computational processes mediating changes in self-esteem are largely unknown. Using computational modeling, my colleagues and I have recently shown that moment-to-moment fluctuations in self-esteem can be explained by the combined influence of: 1) recent expectations about what other people think about us and 2) social prediction errors arising from those expectations when we receive feedback from them (i.e. the difference between actual and expected social feedback). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we showed that social prediction errors correlate with activity in the ventral striatum and momentary changes in self-esteem co-vary with activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

Next steps (this is where you get involved!):
I am looking for MSc students who would like to help me further expand this line of research. I am planning three new projects (1 functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging [fMRI] study, 1 large-scale behavioral study, and 1 drug administration study), which will provide unique insights into the dynamics underlying changes in self-esteem. Research questions will include: 

1.	Can we predict who will develop depressive symptoms in a sample of young people at risk for depression using neuroimaging and our self-esteem task?
2.	How do social comparisons affect changes in self-esteem?
3.	What is the role of dopamine in social feedback processing and changes in self-esteem?

I am looking for students who have:

-	Enthusiasm for social, cognitive and/or clinical neuroscience.
-	Great organizational, interpersonal, and communication skills.
-	Experience with software used for statistical analysis and experimental design (e.g., SPSS, R, MATLAB).
-	Prior experience running human subjects (having worked with vulnerable populations like patients or children is preferred).

Your responsibilities will include:

-	Participant recruitment, screening, and testing.
-	Analysis of behavioral and/or fMRI data.
-	Assistance in further development of the research.

Contact details: 

If you are interested, please send an email with your CV to: Dr. Geert-Jan Will (g.j.will@ucl.ac.uk).

Details

Project to explore levels of self criticism and self compassion within trainee clinical psychologists currently enrolled on clinical psychology training programmes