The School's cognitive electrophysiology lab, with Brainproducts equipment and software, is run by Aureliu Lavric.  It is equipped to record EEGs and ERPs from dense arrays of active electrodes; there is an ultrasound digitiser for accurate localisation of electrodes and co-registration with MRI images.

Eye-tracking facilities (also run by Aureliu Lavric) has Eyelink II and Eyelink 2000 eye-tracking systems (SR-Research, Toronto) which allow monitoring of eye position at high sample rates.

The transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) lab (run by Frederick Verbruggen) has a Magstim Rapid 2 stimulator and a Brainsight Frameless system for positioning the coil relative to an MRI image.  Transcranial direct current stimulation facilities (TDCS) are being developed.  Combined TMS stimulation and EEG recording is possible.

Psychophysiological stimulation/recording facilities include Powerlab GSR and Electrodermal stimulation equipment.

There are a number of test rooms equipped with computers for behavioural research; the School has an E-prime license. There are high performance workstations for computational modelling and analysis of neuroscience data.

The university's MR scanner is a 1.5T Phillips Gyroscan Magnetic with SENSE technology capable of high speed whole-volume acquisitions for event and epoch fMRI designs. Button-box, joystick and trackball response manipulanda with optic-fibre connections are available.  The scanner is equipped with an Applied Science Labs MRI-compatible eye tracking system.  It is a research-dedicated machine, housed in the Peninsula Medical School's research building, and operated by the medical physicists in the Department of Physics; the School of Psychology is part of a consortium of users in several departments of the university and beyond.  Concurrent ERP and fMRI recording is available.

The clinical interface of our cognitive research is facilitated through a Centre for Clinical Neuropsychology, directed by Huw Williams.  Our cognitive neuropsychologists have good relations with clinicians in the region.  Some of us are involved in the Exeter Neuroscience Consortium, which brings together scientists from various disciplines in the university with neurologists and other clinicians in the local health service for monthly evening meetings.  Adam Zeman, Professor of Cognitive and Behavioural Neurology in the Medical School, is closely associated with the School of Psychology, and this provides a further interface between clinical services and neuropsychological research.

What kind of impact are we having through our research? In fact, our work is making a difference in all kinds of ways.

Reminiscence can improve memory performance

Reflecting on our past experiences (including our school days, growing up and the war) can improve the memories of elderly people in care, provided this is done in small groups.

A 2009 study looked at the impact of social group interventions, such as reminiscence, on the health and well-being of 73 people residing in care. After a period of six weeks the researchers found that people who took part in a reminiscence group showed a 12% increase in their memory performance, while those who received individual reminiscence showed no change.

The study led by Catherine Haslam will appear in Psychology and Aging and has been widely covered in the media, including this article in the Guardian.

Group memberships play a important a role in stroke recovery

A 2008 study explored the role that social groups play in protecting well-being during recovery from stroke. It was found that people with a wider network of social groups (family, work and community groups) reported 20% higher well-being than people without these networks.

Critically, this was because people with a wider social network were more likely to hang on to some of their social groups after their stroke. The protective impact was considerable — for every group that a person was able to retain, well-being increased by about 12%. The researchers argued that this highlighted the “importance of having your eggs in multiple baskets as its more likely that some of those eggs will remain intact after a life changing event

This study led by Catherine Haslam appears in 'Neuropsychological Rehabilitation' and has been widely covered in the media, including this article in the Independent.

Should Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) be taken into account within prison systems?

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is a major cause of disability in children and working age adults. TBI can lead to problems in attention, memory, planning and behaviour as well as problems with anger management and impulse control.  Prof Williams and colleagues have shown that rates of injury are quite high in prison populations.  For  both adults and adolescents.  They also found that offenders who had had TBI were more likely to be imprisoned at a younger age and to have re-offended. It is likely that they have difficulty in changing behaviour patterns because of their cognitive problems. These findings have been presented to various groups – including All Party Parliamentary Groups on Head Injury and Prison Health. Prof Williams’ group is now involved in exploring how TBI can be taken account of within prison systems. Particularly to enable affected offenders to be able to manage their behaviour and emotions more effectively.

Consequences of brain injury

Research by the Cognition Group has identified a series of societal impacts resulting from traumatic brain injury (TBI) which is being used to inform policy. Work has included uncovering the high incidence of brain injury in young offenders as detailed above. There are a number of other significant interventions which are having practical benefits for practitioners and users:

• Neurocognitive profiling – e.g. in sports concussion and in encephalitis (with the Encephalitis Society) and represented on the Sports Concussion group for the Jockey Club (now Horse Racing Regulatory Authority) as part of a CASE studentship.
• fMRI Imaging of brain activation in pain conditions with colleagues in Medical Physics and from Rheumatology at the RD&E.
• Family and parenting issues post-brain injury.
• Identifying and managing mood disorders (e.g. post traumatic stress) after brain injury.
• Identity, memory and traumatic experiences and development of post-traumatic stress disorder with SEEORG.

The current research of the group falls under three main headings:

• Associative Learning and Memory
• Control of Cognition
• Clinical Neuropsychology

In addition, the group has a history of research in psycholinguistics and developmental psychology, and there are projects that cut across or combine these interests. The armoury of research methods we use includes:  behavioural testing of normal participants and neurological patients, EEG/ERP, fMRI, eye-tracking, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and psychophysiological measures.

Associative Learning and Memory

(Ian McLaren, Fraser Milton) (Ciro Civille)

The major research focus of this sub-group is fundamental processes of learning in humans and in other animals. 

The central theme of Ian McLaren’s research has been the development of a computational theory of perceptual learning, stimulus representation, and associability processes, derived initially from research on infra-humans, and now applied to a wide range of phenomena in human learning and performance.  To what extent can this elemental associative model account for human cognition, and to what extent do we need to appeal to symbolic rule-based processes? He and his collaborators have addressed this issue in experiments on (among other cognitive skills) discrimination learning and generalisation, causal learning, sequence learning, memory for faces (with Ciro Civile), categorisation (with Fraser Milton), retrospective re-evaluation, recognition memory for recent occurrences, and performance in task-switching situations (the last two with Stephen Monsell).

Fraser Milton also works on categorisation, especially free classification, and the relative contributions of quick and automatic holistic processing versus rule-based analytic processing. He has also been working with Adam Zeman (see below) on  unusual memory deficits — autobiographical amnesia and accelerated forgetting - seen in temporal lobe epilepsy, and Aphantasia - an absence of visual imagery in memory and cognition. He uses techniques such as fMRI and complex behavioural designs in his work.

Ciro Civile works on perceptual learning and recognition with particular reference to face perception. He also uses a wide range of cognitive neuroscience techniques, among them tDCS and EEG/ERP imaging. His work makes contact both with the social aspects of face perception (stigma, objectification) and the more clinical aspects such as prosopagnosia (also known as face blindness).

Control of Cognition

(Stephen Monsell, Aureliu Lavric, Heike Elchlepp, Felice Van’t Wout) - see also Natalia Lawrence and Tobias Stevens in the Clinical group.

We use behavioural and neuroscience techniques such as reaction time measurement, fMRI, EEG/ERP, eyetracking and TMS to investigate the processes by which we organise and regulate cognitive processes, especially in situations where multiple sources of information compete for attention and control of behaviour. This work has potential applications to understanding clinical disorders of control (e.g. ADHD, OCD) and emotion regulation,  socially problematic behaviours such as  risk-taking and compulsive gambling,  and performance limitations and sources of error in multitasking environments.

Stephen Monsell works on the executive processes that organise the mind/brain to accomplish one particular task out of the many currently afforded by the environment, mostly in experiments which require people to switch frequently between cognitive tasks.  His behavioural research investigating the sources of task switch costs, the ability to prepare for a change of tasks and the impact of associations between stimuli, cues and tasks, has led to recent TMS studies and to collaboration with Aureliu Lavric examining electrophysiological and eyetracking indices of task preparation and the processing locus of switch costs.  Monsell and Lavric also investigate switching between languages and between linguistic and other kinds of processing.

In addition, Aureliu Lavric has examined electrophysiological signatures of interference due to a stimulus having a prior association with another task, and deliberate withholding of responses (in "no-go" paradigms). His methodological interests include statistical analysis of EEG/ERP data, simultaneous EEG-fMRI, multivariate temporal and spatial analysis of eye-movement data, and modelling of multi-stable systems.

Heike Elchlepp is also expert in the use of behavioural and neuroscience techniques such as reaction time measurement and EEG/ERP analysis in the context of executive control. He work overlaps a great deal with that of Monsell and Lavric but also overlaps with some of her clinical colleagues (Tobias Stevens) is studying the effects of depression and anxiety on executive function.

Felice Van’t Wout is another expert on executive function, but in this case her specialism is more towards the developmental aspects of control. She collaborates with the other members of the sub-group, and runs experiments that compare normal adult function to that of younger populations (both secondary and primary school age groups). She also has an interest in sequence learning and the rapid acquisition of novel tasks via instruction.

Cognitive Neuroscience

(Cassandra Lowe, Gavin Price, Julian Basanovic)

Cassandra Lowe works with TMS and fMRI to understand the mechanisms controlling eating, and especially over-eating. 

Gavin Price uses advanced fMRI techniques to study numerical condition in adults and young people.

Julian Basanovic uses a range of cognitive neuroscience techniques to study emotion and cognition.

Language Processing

(Nicolas Dumay, Aureliu Lavric)

Emeritus Professor Don Mitchell's main focus is on comprehension in reading, especially models of the extraction of syntactic information,  and ways in which such processes vary from language to language; much of the latter work has been done in collaboration with colleagues in Holland and Spain.  Aureliu Lavric uses electrophysiological and priming techniques to explore the early and automatic decomposition of morphologically complex words into their constituents, in collaboration with Kathy Rastle (Royal Holloway). Stephen Monsell has worked on lexical access in comprehension and production and the relation between them, phonological  encoding and articulatory planning. Chris Code, Honorary Fellow in the School, and editor of the journal Aphasiology, is interested in a several aspects of the neuropsychology of language, calculation and facial expression production. Nicolas Dumay’s work focusses on lexicalisation and consolidation - the process by which a letter string becomes a word. He uses manipulation of learning times in relation to sleep cycles to affect memory for words and so cast light on basic mechanisms in memory and language.

Developmental Psychology

(Ian McLaren, Felice Van't Wout)

Ian McLaren studies the development of basic processes governing learning in young children (Primary School age). His focus is on Latent Inhibition, a phenomenon that young children (4-5 years old) seem to share with the rest of the mammalian world but that apparently disappears in adult humans. Felice Van’t Wout studies the development of executive function in young people, in particular being interested in the rapid learning of new tasks.