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May 8th 2013:
 The independent Complete University Guide for 2014 once again places Psychology at Glasgow university in the very top flight. We are placed 5th this year out of 112 UK universities, narrowly behind Cambridge, Oxford and UCL.
For the full table, please see here
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May 7th 2013:
 Psychology offers 2 MSc courses from the School of Psychology and an MRes course from the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology:
The MSc in BRAIN IMAGING will train you in appropriate research skills for brain imaging research, emphasising advanced methods in the field and will provide you with knowledge of advanced research in key areas of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience.
The MSc in RESEARCH METHODS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE will provide you with both theoretical instruction and practical experience in the methods appropriate for scientific research in psychology.
The MRes in BRAIN SCIENCES: FROM MOLECULES TO MIND provides opportunities for combining research training in brain imaging, psychology and neuroscience. If you are an international student intending to do a PhD in the UK, the programme serves as an excellent introduction to UK research approaches.
For further details on any of these courses and a list of potential supervisors please see here |
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May 1st 2013:
 Congratulations to Dr. Stéphanie Rossit who is the 2012 recipient of the British Psychological Society Award for OUTSTANDING DOCTORAL RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHOLOGY for her thesis completed in Glasgow University’s School of Psychology entitled ‘Action and Rehabilitation in Hemispatial Neglect’.
The work was performed under the supervision of Dr. Monika Harvey and funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and Social European Fund (FCT, No: SFRH/BD/23230/2005). The award will be presented at the Annual BPS Conference in Birmingham in 2014. For further details please see here.
For a list of past winners, see here |
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April 18th 2013:
 Professor Frank Pollick and a team of researchers in the School of Computing Science (Dr Yashar Moshfeghi, Luisa Pinto, Professor Joemon Jose) won the Best Paper award at this year's European Conference on Information Retrieval for their paper "Understanding Relevance: An fMRI Study" See here for more information and see here for an interview with the first author describing the paper.
This research combined techniques of computing science and psychology to discover what parts of the brain have greater activation when we find an image that is relevant to our search needs. The goal of the research is to better understand brain mechanisms of how we evaluate the results of information search for use in developing new generations of technology for information retrieval. |
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March 19th 2013:
 Once again (as in the inaugural year 2012), 3 members of our psychology staff were shortlisted for the Student Teaching Awards. Sara Sereno - Best Teacher Science and Engineering, Stephany Biello - Best Research Supervisor, and Rob Jenkins - Most Innovative Teaching
A brief ceremony took place in the Randolph Hall, on Friday 15th March. It was organised by SRC and attended by Professor Frank Coton (Vice Principal Learning and Teaching Vice Principal). |
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March 8th 2013:
 Congratulations to Dr Stéphanie Rossit who is the 2012 recipient of the British Psychological Society Award for OUTSTANDING DOCTORAL RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHOLOGY for her thesis entitled 'Action and Rehabilitation in Hemispatial Neglect'. The work was performed under the supervision of Dr. Monika Harvey and funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and Social European Fund (FCT, No: SFRH/BD/23230/2005). The award will be presented at the Annual BPS Conference in Birmingham in 2014 with an announcement to be made in The Psychologist. For a list of past winners, see here. |
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March 8th 2013:
 Many congratulations to the Level 1 and 2 Psychology students who were awarded Certificates of Academic Achievement for earning an A grade in semester 1. The certificates were presented by the L1 and 2 Course Tutors, Drs Jason Bohan and Lorna Morrow, at a reception in the School’s seminar room where Director of Teaching, Prof Stephany Biello, welcomed the students and congratulated them on their achievement. The Certificates were introduced this year as a way of formally recognising and rewarding hard working students for their sustained excellence during the semester. |
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January 21st 2013:
 Professor Patrick O'Donnell was interviewd by The Telegraph on the subject of Lance Armstrong's interview with Oprah Winfrey.
The disgraced cyclist's expressions of "sorrow and regret" are undermined by revealing smiles, according to Professor O'Donnell.
More information can be found here.
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January 18th 2013:
 Congratulations to Dr Rob Jenkins, who has been awarded an Invitation Fellowship (Long-Term) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). The funding will allow him to spend 3 consecutive months in Kyoto conducting research with Prof Sakiko Yoshikawa. |
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December 20th 2012:
 Rob Jenkins has been selected for membership in the Global Young Academy (GYA) - the voice of young scientists around the world. The 172 current members include leading young scientists from 54 countries and all continents. Four of the current members are based in the UK. Rob is the first UK psychologist to be selected for the GYA. More information can be found here. |
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December 17th 2012:
 The School of Psychology and the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (within the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology) are pleased to announce the availability of:
- MSc (1+3) and PhD (+3) studentships funded by the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC), and
- PhD (+3) scholarships from the College of Science and Engineering.
Funding will be available from October 2013. Deadline for submissions are January 31, 2013.
For more information please visit the Postgraduate Research Opportunities page and the College of Science and Engineering Scholarship/ ESRC DTC scholarship page. |
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December 14th 2012:
 Monday blues explain why patients miss hospital and GP appointments. Significant health and financial savings could be achieved by changing schedules, say Dr Rob Jenkins and David Ellis in PLoS One. “If you could cut non-attendance by just a tenth – from 12% to 10.8%, you could save the NHS £60 million a year,” says Dr Jenkins. David Ellis concludes: “Our study clearly shows that appointments at the beginning of the week are missed more often than those at the end of the week. “A simple strategy for reducing missed appointments could be to schedule appointments towards the end of the week wherever possible.” A summary can be found here. |
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October 12th 2012:
 Professors Joachim Gross and Gregor Thut have been awarded a prestigious Wellcome Trust Joint Investigator Award for a project entitled:
'Natural and modulated neural communication: State-dependent decoding and driving of human brain oscillations'.
They will be working in partnership to understand aspects of rhythmic network activity in the human brain. As part of this research, they plan to develop and use methodologies to decode and change brain communication by means of MEG/EEG and non-invasive brain stimulation. They seek to understand how the oscillatory network activity gives rise to the complexity and efficiency of human behaviour and to explore to what extent this activity can be controlled by brain stimulation in the healthy and diseased brain. |
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September 11th 2012:
INDUCTION FOR STUDENTS ARRIVING IN SEPTEMBER 2012
Induction will be between 10am and 12pm or between 2pm and 4pm on Friday 14 September in the Boyd Orr building, room LT-D. The times and places for the psychology enrolment and induction sessions,
and more information, are available here. |
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August 21st 2012:
 Rachael Jack, University Teacher in the School of Psychology has been awarded a prestigious 3-year "Future Research Leaders" grant from ESRC. The Future Research Leaders scheme aims to support outstanding early career researchers to carry out excellent research and to develop all aspects of their research and knowledge exchange skills. The research will investigate the complexities of cross-cultural emotion communication using a cross-disciplinary approach involving psychophysics (reverse correlation), computer graphics (4-D structural imaging), statistical modelling, and hierarchical cluster analysis. |
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August 7th 2012:
 Dr Rob Jenkins, senior lecturer in the School of Psychology "was recognised
for his outstanding scientific creativity, the inter- disciplinary reach of his research and his passion for science communication" by the award of the Royal Society of Edinburgh's RSE Prize.
The RSE/Makdougall Brisbane Medal, recognising achievements of early career researchers in the physical sciences, was jointly awarded.
The press release can be found here. |
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June 29th 2012:
 Psychology graduation took place in the Bute Hall on the 27th June. At a School of Psychology reception beforehand, students and their parents were addressed by Prof Paddy O'Donnell and prizes were awarded to our top students, some of whom are shown in this photo - from left to right are Ailsa Morison, Fiona Provan, Julia Gillard, Aliyah Rehman, Anna Sierka, Sasskia Bruers and Mhairi McDonald. |
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May 24th 2012:
 Psychology at Glasgow University has been placed fourth equal in the table of 109 UK Psychology departments in the Guardian University Guide 2013 (just behind UCL, Cambridge and Oxford and level with Bath). We are especially proud of being by far the most highly rated Psychology department in Scotland but even more proud of our "value-added" rating of 10-out-of-10. This rating shows how much we help our students attain final degree grades that are much higher than would be expected from entry qualifications.
The full table of results can be found here. |
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April 19th 2012:
 The GU Recruitment and International Office is calling all international students and asking them to say what they think about the University of Glasgow in terms of learning, support and life in general. As a thank you, they are offering five lucky students the chance to win £200! Simply take five minutes to fill out the following International Student Barometer survey for a chance to win. The survey can be found here |
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April 2nd 2012:
 Nicola Van Rijsbergen received the 'Best Dissertation Supervisor' award at the Annual Glasgow University Student Teaching Awards event. More than 300 university lecturers were nominated and this success was an excellent achievement.
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March 29th 2012:
 Professor Paddy O'Donnell featured on BBC news on the 28th March, letting us know that a short spell of sunshine was not likely to change the mood of the nation. |
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March 27th 2012:
 Dr Bo Yao was interviewed live on BBC Radio 4 about his recent work on how the 'brain talks over boring stuff'. The audio clip is here and the study is also reported here.
The research was conducted by Dr Yao with colleagues Professor Pascal Belin and Professor Christoph Scheepers within the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology’s Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging. |
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March 27th 2012:
 The Annual Glasgow University Student Teaching Awards event was hosted by the SRC in the Senate Room on 23rd March. The School of Psychology was nominated in three categories and Rob Jenkins picked up the prize for Innovation in Teaching. |
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March 27th 2012:
 During Brain Awareness week (12-18 March 2012), 800 enthusiastic budding scientists from Glasgow and surrounding schools have enjoyed presentations and workshops letting them explore the wonders of the human brain.
Teachers, parents and children have warmly commented on the success of this event.
Thanks to all the post-graduates from the School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology who got involved! |
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March 8th 2012:
 The School of Psychology hosted the largest undergraduate conference held in the UK. The 2012 British Psychological Society Undergraduate Conference on 17th March saw 300 students from across the UK attending, with 70 papers and keynotes from Carole Allan (BPS President) and Rob Jenkins who delivered a very entertaining and thought-provoking address. |
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March 6th 2012:
 There is a highly informative scientific profile of our Head of School and Head of Institute in a Q&A item in the current issue of Current Biology which can be found here.
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February 21st 2012:
 AQM Postgraduate Funding 2012
The School of Psychology and the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (within the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology) are pleased to announce the availability of PhD studentships in Advanced Quantitative Methods (AQM). Funding will be available from October 2012.
Eligibility
We invite applications from students from the UK or EU countries as well as international/ overseas candidates.
Application Process
Students should make an application to study through the online application system stating their interest in AQM Psychology funding. Applications should include:
- a CV and two academic references
- a research proposal (maximum 1200 words, outlining the relevance/use of AQM) with a named supervisor
- an academic transcript
Questions
Should you have any questions regarding this funding opportunity, please contact Lynda Young (lynda.young@glasgow.ac.uk)
Deadline: Friday 23rd March 2012 |
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February 14th 2012:
 ESRC Postgraduate Funding 2012
The School of Psychology and the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (within the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology) are pleased to announce the availability of MSc (1+3) and PhD (+3) studentships funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Funding will be available from October 2012.
Eligibility
Applicants must be students from the UK or EU countries and satisfy the eligibility criteria of the ESRC. Research topics should be based in the following areas:
Psychology Pathway
Two ESRC doctoral studentships are available in the Psychology Pathway of the ESRC Scottish Doctoral Training Centre.
Psychology at Glasgow is part of the research training pathways that forms part of the ESRC Scottish Doctoral Training Centre. Programmes available at the University of Glasgow include the PhD in Psychology (+3 studentships), or 1+3 studentships beginning with:
MSc Psychological Research Methods
MSc in Brain Imaging
Language-Based Pathways
Two ESRC doctoral studentships are available in the Language-based Pathways of the ESRC Scottish Doctoral Training Centre. Programmes available at the University of Glasgow include PhD's in Psychology (+3 studentships), or 1+3 studentships beginning with:
MSc in Brain Imaging
Application Process
Students should make an application to study through the online application system stating their interest in ESRC Psychology or Language funding. Applications should include:
- a CV and two academic references
- a research proposal (maximum 1200 words) with a named supervisor
- an academic transcript
Questions
Should you have any questions regarding this funding opportunity, please contact Lynda Young (lynda.young@glasgow.ac.uk)
Deadline: Friday 23rd March 2012 |
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September 7th 2011:
 Rob Jenkins has been recently accepted as a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Young Academy of Scotland. This group of young researchers is likely to play an important role in science policy in Scotland in the future. |
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August 30th 2011:
 Level 3 Induction Class is on Thursday 15th September at 11am, in room G255 of the main University building. |
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August 30th 2011:
 Psychological Studies Induction Class is on Thursday 15th September at 10am, Seminar Room, 58 Hillhead Street. |
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August 30th 2011:
 Level 4 Induction Class is on Friday 16th September at 10am in Room 375, James Watt Building. |
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April 7th 2011:
 Pascal Belin, Marie-Helene Grosbras and Guillaume Rousselet have been awarded a £216K MRC grant running over 18 months. The funding is part of the Lifelong Health and Wellbeing (LLHW) scheme, a major cross-council initiative supporting multi-disciplinary research addressing factors across the life course that influence healthy ageing and wellbeing in later life. The research will investigate lifelong changes in the cerebral processing of social signals using fMRI. |
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April 7th 2011:
 Lars Muckli and Fraser Smith have been getting considerable public exposure for their work on how the human brain actively predicts what input it will receive. To quote from Dr Muckli - "We are continuously anticipating what we will see, hear or feel next. If parts of an image are obstructed we still have precise expectation of what the whole object will look like." More information is available on the University's web site at the link (here) and there is a BBC2 Scotland Newsdrive interview (here) |
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March 24th 2011:
 Our own Stephanie Connell (undergraduate and postgraduate in Psychology recently competed in the British Universities and Colleges Sport championships in Karate and won the Women's Kata Senior Gold medal for Glasgow University. |
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March 17th 2011:
 The Glasgow University Researcher Development Committee has awarded funding to David Ellis in Psychology and Michael Comerford at Computing Science for their application 'Encouraging Interdisciplinary Research Between Early Career Researchers'. They will be developing and hosting a conference based on a research council's theme/strategic aim. |
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March 16th 2011:
 Postgraduate Funding 2011:
The School of Psychology and the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (within the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology) are pleased to announce the availability of MSc (1+3) and PhD (+3) studentships funded by the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC). Funding will be available from September 2011.
More information here.
Eligibility - Applicants must be students from the UK or EU countries and satisfy the eligibility criteria of the ESRC.
Research topics should be based in the following three areas:
Psychology Pathway - At least two ESRC doctoral studentships are available in the Psychology Pathway of the ESRC Scottish Doctoral Training Centre.
Psychology is one of the research training pathways that forms part of the ESRC Scottish Doctoral Training Centre. ESRC 1+3 and +3 studentships in Psychology are available at the Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews. Potential applicants to Glasgow should follow the instructions below in order to be considered.
Programmes available at the University of Glasgow include the PhD in Psychology
(+3 studentships), or 1+3 studentships beginning with:
• MSc Psychological Research Methods
• MSc in Brain Imaging
Language-Based Pathways - At least two ESRC doctoral studentships available in Language-based Pathways of the ESRC Scottish Doctoral Training Centre.
Language Sciences and Social and Applied Investigations in Language (SAIL) are
research training pathways that form part of the ESRC Scottish Doctoral Training
Centre. ESRC 1+3 and +3 studentships in the pathways are available at the
Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews. Potential applicants
to Glasgow should follow the instructions below in order to be considered.
Programmes available at the University of Glasgow include PhD's in Psychology (+3
studentships), or 1+3 studentships beginning with::
Language Sciences
• MSc in Brain Imaging
Application Process - Students should make an application to study through the online application system which can be viewed here stating their interest in ESRC Psychology or Language funding.
Applications should include:
• a CV and two academic references;
• a research proposal with a named supervisor
• an academic transcript
Questions
Should you have any questions regarding this funding opportunity, please contact
Lynda Young (lynda.young@glasgow.ac.uk)
Deadline: Friday 15th April 2011 |
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March 12th 2011:
 Frank Pollick and Lawrie McKay from Glasgow together with Kerri Johnson from UCLA have raised huge media interest in their recent Cognition article 'He Throws Like a Girl (But Only When He's Sad): Emotion Affects Sex-Decoding of Biological Motion Displays'. Their study demonstrated gender stereotypes. Body language was more likely to be judged as masculine when it seemed to convey anger and as feminine when is seemed to convey sadness. Frank Pollick videotaped male and female actors throwing baseballs in a style that conveyed a range of emotions. Using technology to disguise the actors' sex, the researchers presented the videos to observers and asked them to make judgments about the throwers' emotions and gender. With minimal information, observers discerned the thrower's emotion but there was good evidence that prior beliefs and stereotypes can lead to systematic errors in the normally accurate perception of body motions. |
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March 11th 2011:
 Gregor Thut, Joachim Gross and Philippe Schyns have been awarded a £460K BBSRC grant running over 3 years. This research will investigate how direct interactions with brain oscillations shape visual attention and perception. It relies on multimodal neuroimaging combining psychophysics, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and electro-and magnetoencephalography (EEG or MEG). |
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January 25th 2011:
 Congratulations to Simon Garrod and Tony Sanford who have been awarded the prestigious Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, 2011, from the Society for Text and Discourse! Quoting from the award letter: "This is the Society's most prestigious award, which honors scholars who have made outstanding scientific contributions to the study of discourse processing and text analysis. Previous awards winners were Walter Kintsch, Herb Clark and Art Graesser"
(here) or (here). |
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January 21st 2011:
 Congratulations to Mike Burton, who has been awarded one of the most prestigious prizes in experimental psychology - the EPS Mid-Career Award (here).
As you can see from the EPS website, the annual award was established to recognise a psychologist who has a distinguished research record over a substantial period. It recognises breadth of research achievement, and contribution to the advancement of experimental psychology. |
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December 16th 2010:
 Christoph Scheepers (Glasgow) and Yuki Kamide (Dundee) have been awarded a £430K ESRC grant to investigate dynamic mental representations of motion events in sentence processing. The project will employ a post-doc and a project-related PhD student for 3 years. Using a combination of eye-tracking, cross-modal priming, and visual change detection paradigms, the project aims at finding out how mental representations of linguistically described motion events (throwing, pushing, rolling, etc.) dynamically unfold over time, as well as how detailed and task-dependent such representations are. |
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December 16th 2010:
 The Leverhulme Trust has awarded the University of Glasgow a research grant of £78,097 over 2 years to study perceived 3D trajectories of line motion. The research project will be undertaken by Martin Lages and not by or for the Trust.
This research will extend work with Suzanne Heron recently published in PLoS Computational Biology (doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000999) |
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December 9th 2010:
 Dr Klaus Kessler has received £100k from ESRC to play with Dr Who (see picture) for another year, but this time in the MEG. For those who have not participated in one of these experiments, the Dr Who action figurine is used as an avatar in Klaus' visuo-spatial perspective taking experiments. Recently, Klaus and his colleagues revealed that we mentally simulate or emulate a rotation of our body to adopt someone else's perspective (Kessler & Thomson, 2010; Kessler & Rutherford, 2010). MEG will allow the research team to determine the coupling oscillatory networks in the brain, shedding light on the particulars of the mental rotation mechanism. |
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December 3rd 2010:
 David Ellis has been awarded a postgraduate Internship by the Economic and Social Research Council/The Scottish Government Internship Initiative. His project will involve analysing data from the first NHS Scotland Patient Experience Inpatients Survey. David will carry out a secondary analysis of the survey data and produce a written report on key findings from the analysis. He will assist Scottish Government analysts with the development and roll-out of the 2010/11 survey for NHS Scotland. The project will offer the opportunity to work with a range of users within the Scottish Government and NHS Scotland. |
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November 24th 2010:
 Lukasz Piwek has won an ESRC Postgraduate Internship to work for 3 months with the UK Border Agency. The title of the project is 'A rapid review of evidence on identifying suspicious behaviour in ports and airports through behavioural analysis'. Over that time he will be working in London in the Research & Development Section of the UK Border Agency in order to provide a clear and relevant review of the published research evidence base for policy and operational colleagues within the UK Border Agency. This evidence could either directly inform options for operational activity in this area or may identify evidence gaps requiring further original research. |
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October 6th 2010:
 Luca Vizioli, Guillaume A. Rousselet and Roberto Caldara do not look alike! However, they have discovered the first neurophysiological evidence of the 'all look alike' perceptual experience for other-race faces (i.e., all East-Asian faces all look alike for Westerners and vice-versa for Easterners). This challenge was achieved with a novel electrophysiological approach based on the computation of single-trial Repetition Suppression responses. These findings will be published soon in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. |
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September 24th 2010:
 Rosie Begbie and Sarah Gunn were jointly awarded the Alastair Weir Prize for Excellence in Level 3 Psychology. Rosie received her cheque from Professor O'Donnell at a recent event. |
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August 10th 2010:
 Joachim Gross and Gregor Thut have been awarded £250,000 over 3 years by the Wellcome Trust to study the neural mechanisms of sensory awareness. Specifically, the contribution of oscillatory brain activity to perception and attention will be investigated using MEG and TMS. |
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July 8th 2010:
 Congratulations to Dr Steve Draper who was recently awarded a Teaching Excellence Award by the Principal of the university for his sterling work on innovations in teaching.
Steve has also recently obtained grants approximating £20,000 for developing his ideas on effective teaching. |
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July 8th 2010:
 The Leverhulme Trust has awarded the University of Glasgow a research grant of £116,899 over 3 years to study the "effects of age, luminance and pupil size on retinal and cortical processing speed." The research project will be undertaken by Guillaume Rousselet and not by or for the Trust. |
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June 29th 2010:
 This year saw a very strong academic performance from our final honours students. Shown here are a number of our prize-winners with Head of Department Mike Burton. Starting from the left - Laura Pidgeon, Kacper Wieczorek, Richard Kunert and Clare Sutherland.
The prizes awarded were as follows:
Henry J Watt Prize for best overall student - shared by Clare Sutherland and Laura Pidgeon;
Pickford Prize for the best student in Social psychology - Cleo Barrable;
BPS prize for the best undergraduate overall - Clare Sutherland;
Ede and Ravenscroft prize for best final year student in the Faculty of Information Sciences - Clare Sutherland;
Thouless prize for the best critical review - shared by Richard Kunert and Kacper Wieczorek |
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May 20th 2010:
 Congratulations to Dr Lorna Morrow, Dr Paul Bishop and Dr Steve Draper who each received an award from the FELT fund whose remit is to assist projects that will enhance learning and teaching. |
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May 20th 2010:
 Dr Guillaume Rousselet and Dr Carl Gaspar in the Department of Psychology, along with colleagues in Edinburgh and Canada, studied how healthy aging affects the time course of face visual processing. They report data from 62 healthy adults, aged between 19 and 98, suggesting lower signal-to-noise ratios in older brains, as well as an estimated 1 ms / year delay in face sensitivity. The results also suggest a qualitative change from a young to an older pattern of brain activity at around 47±4 years old. The article is published in the new journal Frontiers in Perception Science and can be viewed here. |
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April 27th 2010:
 Professor Philippe Schyns has published his first editorial in the new publication Frontiers in Perception Science. "Grand challenges in perception science: modeling the future" can be viewed here. |
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April 7th 2010:
 Professor Joachim Gross has been awarded the prestigious Sam Williamson prize at the International Conference for Biomagnetism for his outstanding contribution to the field of MEG research. |
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March 29th 2010:
 The Voice Neurocognition Laboratory headed by Prof Pascal Belin recently published a paper in Current Biology demonstrating that voice averaging increases the perceived attractiveness of a voice. Participants significantly preferred voices which contained an increasing number of voice composites compared to the original voices that these composites were constructed from. The reason for this increase in attractiveness ratings with vocal averaging seems to be a smoother voice texture as well as a closer resemblance to the vocal prototype. The research received media coverage from Radio BBC4 and BBC Scotland. |
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March 26th 2010:
 'Remembering the future: Visual cortex saves energy by predicting what it will see' - Lars Muckli from our Department (in collaboration with the Max-Planck Institute) has discovered that the brain saves energy by predicting what it is likely to see. The visual cortex does not simply react to visual stimuli but proactively predicts what it is likely to see in any given context – for example, within familiar environments such as your house or office.
By doing so it uses less energy to process images, but if something unexpected were to appear in that familiar environment, the visual cortex becomes more active in order to process this information. "Imagine your desk in your office," said lead researcher Dr Lars Muckli. "You’ve seen it a million times so your brain knows what it looks like so it doesn’t need to spend lots of time processing the scene. It already has a mental image of it and so the brain predicts that this is what it will see before you walk into the room. However, if you were to walk in to your office one day and see someone totally unexpected sitting in your chair – the Prime Minister, for example, your brain would have to work harder to process the same scene."
The paper, 'Stimulus Predictability Reduces Responses in Primary Visual Cortex', was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
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March 17th 2010:
 The Department of Psychology and CCNi have launched an exciting new MSc in Brain Imaging.
WHAT IS IT: This 12 month course covers the use of brain imaging techniques using on-site fMRi, ERP and EEG, MEG, and TMS.
WHO IS IT FOR?: For graduates of all relevant disciplines e.g. Psychology, Mathematics, Statistics, Computing Science, Engineering, Biological Sciences.
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES: Prepares students for research in scientific and clinical careers.
IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN APPLYING : Please e-mail our administrator with a brief (50 word) CV and the areas of research you are interested in. We will send you an application form and information on scholarships and fees reductions - k.pirie@psy.gla.ac.uk
The CCNi webpages can be viewed here.
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March 17th 2010:
 The CCNi Social Interactions Project hosted an event entitled 'The Science of Social Interaction' in collaboration with Glasgow Science Centre as part of the UK-wide ESRC Festival of Social Science. The purpose of the event was to showcase the psychology of first impressions and their consequences, and involved exhibits by three Project Investigators from the Department of Psychology: Roberto Caldara, Jamie Hillis and Rob Jenkins.
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March 2nd 2010:
 Congratulations to Jason Bohan who has just been awarded a British Academy grant for a project entitled, "The Effect of Reader's Mood on Semantic Anomaly Detection." This research will investigate whether a reader's mood state affects the style of processing they adopt whilst reading short stories. |
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February 23rd 2010:
 Rachel Jack's work on facial expression and culture has received coverage in a recent edition of the Discovery Channel Magazine. To quote from Rachel, "Westerners look at the eyes and mouth in equal measure whereas Easterners favour the eyes and neglect the mouth,"
The eye movements of subjects were tracked while they looked at faces showing a variety of expressions. Rachel suggests that East Asians may try to suppress displays of emotion, which leads to expression via the eyes rather than mouth. "The muscles around the eye region are less easily controlled than the mouth," she says, "it's possible East Asians focus on the eye region because it might leak tell-tale signs of how someone is feeling." |
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February 23rd 2010:
 Joachim Gross has been awarded the Senior Fellowship Award from the Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz for excellence in research. The recognition is based on an outstanding research record, documented by publications and awards. |
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January 29th 2010:
 Prof. Philippe Schyns is editing an exciting new journal entitled 'Frontiers in Perception Science' which is a specialty section of Frontiers in Psychology and is devoted to understanding perception from an interdisciplinary perspective.
It aims to provide an interactive forum for cutting-edge thoughts, models and experimental studies of the mechanisms of perception, and for promoting an integrative interdisciplinary approach. |
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January 29th 2010:
 Lars Muckli is the Scientific Co-ordinator for a major CCNI debate on the topic: Does BOLD fMRI reveal Pseudo Neuronal Activity?
Discussants include Prof. Philippe Schyns (Glasgow), Prof. Aniruddha Das (Columbia), Dr Ahalya Viswanathan (Max Planck), Prof Martin Lauritzen (Glostrup Hospital, Denmark) and Prof. Nikos Logothetis (Max Planck). |
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January 22nd 2010:
 The Admin staff in the Department raised over £480 for Haiti with an inspired selection of home baking. |
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October 22nd 2009:
 Robert Winston visited the department in October to film footage for the BBC's flagship science programme, A Child Of Our Time. Researchers Rob Jenkins, David Simmons, and Oliver Garrod used the department's face modelling facilities to analyse subtle differences between the faces of identical twins. But how can genetically identical twins be different? And how might personality relate to appearance? To find out, tune in to the BBC's 10th Anniversary special of A Child Of Our Time, to be broadcast in April 2010. |
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October 15th 2009:
 The Glasgow Science Centre recently hosted a Homecoming Scotland 'Meet the Scientist for our Celebration of Scottish Science' event involving both researchers and students from our Department over the weekend.
As part of the year long 2009 Homecoming Scotland events programme, the Glasgow Science Centre (GSC) put on a uniquely Scottish theme involving pipes, tartan, haggis, and dolly the sheep. Our researchers were at hand to raise awareness, answer questions, and to broadcast a number of the contemporary findings that are currently being produced by the Department. Visitors to the GSC were also asked to become involved in the research. One stand, from the department, was devoted to Sleep Research and Circadian Timing. In which, adults had the opportunity to discover their individual diurnal preference (if a person is more of a morning or evening typed person). This was achieved through the use of an online version of the Horne & Ostberg Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire. Morning type people were given Lark certificates and Evening type people were given Owl certificates. Kids also had the chance to learn more about the brain by making neurons out of colourful pipe cleaners, colouring in the brain, and by taking part in sleep related worksheets.
Derek Shirlaw, the Public Engagement Champion for the GSC, commented on the success of the event by thanking those involved from the Department and by suggesting future occasions for public engagement. Quoting from Derek: “I'm hoping for many more opportunities like this across universities and other organisations involved in public engagement. I'm starting to think about how we can build upon this particular celebration of Scottish science event for next year.”
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September 25th 2009:
 GSC-Psychology Summer Studentship.
Rob Jenkins has initiated a fantastic link between our Department and the Glasgow Science Centre (GSC). Prof. Mike Burton can be seen in the front of this photograph at a meeting to arrange for our students to take up a summer research residency in the GSC. This will allow our students to gain access to over 400,000 visitors who then become potential research participants.
Quoting from Rob: "Some psychological research is best conducted outside of the lab. This initiative provides a unique opportunity for students to get out there and run experiments in a public setting. It enables students to undertake research projects that would otherwise be out of reach, and GSC is always keen to have real science taking place on site ... Glasgow Science Centre does a fantastic job of demystifying science and exposing the process of scientific discovery. Teaming up with them is another way of giving something back to the public who, at the end of the day, fund our research. If we can help to get people interested in science, then I’m all for it ... The student benefits twice over. Not only do they get excellent research experience, they also get experience in communicating science to non-specialists. Public engagement is increasingly important, so the scholarship is a real asset to the recipient when it comes to the job market."
The university publicity can be viewed here |
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September 23rd 2009:
 Clare Sutherland and Anna Dzieciol were joint winners of the Alastair Weir Prize for excellence in Part One Finals examinations (2009). They received cash prizes from Prof Mike Burton (HoD) at a ceremony in the Department. |
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September 16th 2009:
 Ian Charest has received a Value In People Award from the Wellcome Trust. The broad aim of this award is to help universities in the recruitment, career progression and retention of key academic and research staff. He receives 6 months funding following on from submission of his Ph.D. |
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September 10th 2009:
 Dr Guillaume Rousselet and his team in the Department of Psychology have shown that aging has a negative impact on face recognition. They studied the electrical activity of the brains of young (mean age 22) and old (mean age 70) people as a series of pictures of two different faces were shown to them which had varying levels of 'noise' in them.
The researchers were able to precisely quantify a processing speed delay of 47 milliseconds (ms), around 10ms for every extra decade from the age of 20. At 98-years-old, Ken, pictured wearing a 256 electrode EEG net to record electrical brain activity on the scalp surface, is the oldest participant in the study. (Photo Credit JD Howell).
Face processing produces a signal in the visual cortex of the brain, which peaks at 170ms after presentation of a face – resulting in this signal being called the N170.
In the young a strong N170 response was more closely associated with the appearance of faces, whilst in older subjects it also occurred in response to noise, perhaps implying a reduced ability to differentiate faces from noise in older brains.
Dr Rousselet said: “Very few studies have attempted to measure the effect of ageing on the time-course of visual processing in response to complex stimuli like faces. We found that, as well as an overall reduction in speed in the elderly, one particular component of the response to a face – the N170 – is less sensitive to faces in the elderly.”
“Our data supports the common belief that as we get older we get slower. Beyond this general conclusion, our research provides new tools to quantify by how much the brain slows down in the particular context of face perception.”
“Now, we need to identify the reasons for the speed reduction and for the heterogeneity of the effects – indeed, why the brains of some older subjects seem to tick as fast as the brains of some young subjects is at this point a complete mystery”.
The paper is published in the open access journal BMC Neuroscience and can be viewed here |
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August 24th 2009:
 Rachael Jack's research that suggests that people from different cultures read facial expressions differently has received extensive international press coverage and turned out to be the most read and most shared item on the BBC News website.
Rachel is quoted - "Interestingly, although the eye region is ambiguous, subjects tended to bias their judgements towards less socially-threatening emotions - surprise rather than fear, for example. This perhaps highlights cultural differences when it comes to the social acceptability of emotions."
This difference in perception is also reflected in the differences between Eastern and Western emoticons - the typographical characters used to convey emotions in e-mails. The Eastern emoticons are not only the right way up but focus on the eyes, whilst in the West the mouth is important. |
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July 29th 2009:
 Congratulations to Sara Sereno, Guillaume Rousselet, and Cyril Pernet for their new £275,000, two-year ESRC grant: "Fluent reading and the brain: Co-registration and statistical decomposition of eye fixations and anatomically-based lectrophysiology."
The grant also includes money for grid use and scanning time. This was the first grant to have received the new departmental incentive bonus. |
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July 28th 2009:
 Professor Tony Sanford has just been recognised as a Fellow of the Society for Text and Discourse. This award is for his sustained outstanding contributions to the science of this field. The significance of this is evidenced by the fact that Fellows must show that they have enriched or advanced their field on a scale well beyond that of being a good researcher, practitioner, teacher, or supervisor. Not only must the contribution and/or performance be outstanding, it must also have had impact that is recognized broadly in the U.S. and/or internationally. |
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July 20th 2009:
 Dr Lars Muckli in the Department of Psychology's Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging has just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science a very exciting article about research with a 10-year-old girl born with half a brain who is able to see normally through one eye. The child, from Germany, has both fields of vision in one eye and is the only known case of its kind in the world. Dr Lars Muckli said: "This study has revealed the surprising flexibility of the brain when it comes to self-organising mechanisms for forming visual maps." "The brain has amazing plasticity but we were quite astonished to see just how well the single hemisphere of the brain in this girl has adapted to compensate for the missing half." |
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July 14th 2009:
 Glasgow University psychologists provided a very substantial contribution to the recent Human Brain Mapping conference in San Francisco with more than 25 presentations being made. Two of these papers were selected as conference highlights - Gregor Thut and Vincenzo Rome “Spatially and frequency specific biasing of visual detection through rhythmic TMS over occipito-parietal sites: Evidence for a causal role of posterior alpha-oscillations in sensory selection” and Fraser W Smith & Lars Muckli “Can Non-Stimulated Regions of Early Visual Cortex Predict Scene Category?” |
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July 14th 2009:
 Guillaume Rousselet was one of the authors of a recent paper on dyslexia which was covered by the press and featured on the BBC website where it can be viewed here as well as on other websites where the original message was not always very accurate, for example in the Scotsman here. The original paper can be found here |
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July 3rd 2009:
 Almudena Capilla has been granted a PhD 'Extraordinary Award' by the Faculty of Psychology of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).
This award indicates a very high quality of thesis and excellent academic progression. Her thesis title is 'Development and brain dynamics of cognitive control processes'. |
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July 1st 2009:
 Honours student Mable Nakubulwa is working on a project investigating the level 1 psychology student experience in the lab teaching environment with Judith Stevenson and Maxine Swingler. The project is funded by a FELT (Faculty Education Learning and Teaching) award from FIMS to promote effective teaching-learning environments and student retention. |
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June 18th 2009:
 BPS- and EPS-funded undergraduate scholar Clare Sutherland presented the Belladonna illusion to a public audience at the Glasgow University Science Festival on June 14th. The illusion shows that the appearance of other people's eyes (pupil size) is important in forming first impressions. |
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June 8th 2009:
 Rob Jenkins was recently interviewed by Steve Russell, chairman of American security firm 3VR Security, about face recognition and surveillance.
The interview can be viewed here or here. |
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June 5th 2009:
 Third year honours psychology students have been very successful in competitions for summer research funding and internships - Dionysia Mexa, Sarah Breustedt and Jessica Wainman-Lefley (Nuffield); Christine Macleod, Aline Scherff, Kacper Wieczorek, Michael Stoker, Anna Dzieciol and Richard Kunert (Wellcome); Clare Sutherland, Chris Benwell and Kerry Ann Ross (Carnegie); Clare Sutherland (EPS).
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April 30th 2009:
 Kerry Kilborn is part of an international consortium of 10 research labs in the US, Canada, and Scotland that has obtained $2.7m from the National Institutes of Health for a project entitled - "Neural ElectroMagnetic Ontologies: ERP Knowledge Representation & Integration (NEMO)".
Electro-encephalography (EEG) and event-related potentials (ERP) are venerable techniques for cognitive and clinical research on human brain function. To realize their full potential, however, it is necessary to address some long-standing challenges in conducting large-scale comparison and integration of results across experiments and research laboratories. The NEMO consortium will develop an integrated tool environment for storage and management of EEG and ERP data and meta-data, measure generation and labeling, ontology development, and meta-analysis. This environment will be web-accessible so that partners will have shared access to the project data, analysis tools, ontologies, and meta-analysis results. At the end of this project, the ontologies, annotated database, tools, and technologies will be made available to the larger research community.
A prototype web portal, including examples of ERP data, can be viewed here. |
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April 27th 2009:
 Sara Sereno from our Department has recently been recognised by her alma mater. Northern Illinois University (NIU), in a milestone anniversary of its founding, is presenting The Sereno Family with the Outstanding Alumni Award for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (ceremony April 23, 2009). Sara's mother first attended NIU in the evenings to obtain a Masters in Art Education (1976) while raising the family and teaching. All 6 of the children attended NIU and received Bachelor's degrees. They all continued in academia, obtaining Ph.D.s and are all currently working as senior academics at US and UK universities. Apart from one brother who is a paleontologist, they are all pursuing research in exploring brain function in the areas of vision and language. View Chicago Tribune front page article here, NIU story here and biographical information here |
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April 27th 2009:
 Christoph Scheepers (University of Glasgow, photo) and Fernanda Ferreira (University of Edinburgh) have recently been awarded a substantial ESRC research grant worth £395,676 on "Get-versus be-passives in English: A functional investigation". The goal is to conduct a thorough empirical investigation of the factors that promote or restrict the use of passive voice sentences in English, with a particular focus on the different forms that a passive can take. The project will employ a range of different methodologies, from corpus-linguistic methods to psycholinguistic paradigms such as syntactic priming and eye-tracking. |
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April 2nd 2009:
 Kerry Kilborn has generated a spinout company: Diagnostic Potentials Ltd. which uses cognitive neuroscience technologies (in particular high resolution EEG) to meet unmet clinical needs in the diagnosis and treatment of central nervous system disorders. The first product is a clinical test to help doctors accurately diagnose Alzheimer's disease at an early stage, when treatment can provide the greatest benefit to patients.
In recent years the company has received support from the Scottish government, the Wellcome Trust, the Translational Medicine Research Collaboration, Scottish Enterprise, and private investors. These achievements have been recognized along the way with various awards, including SMART:Scotland, the Great Scot Award in Science and Medicine, the Pfizer Award for Innovation in Science and Medicine, and the John Logie Baird Award for Innovation.
In one current project, the Alzheimer test is being used to identify new ways to detect the effects of drug treatment on the brain in patients who just begin to receive treatment. This project is carried out by a multidisciplinary team from Psychology, Biomedical Engineering (Strathclyde University), Diagnostic Potentials Ltd, and the NHS. |
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March 25th 2009:
 Petra Vetter (one of our postdocs) played a central role in a recent BBC 2 Horizon programme with David Baddiel as the presenter. Filmed at UCL, the focus was on Brian Butterworth's work on dyscalculia, a selective deficit in numerical and mathematical abilities. Petra stimulated with TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) the area in the brain that is supposedly crucial for numerical processing (right intraparietal sulcus) while David was doing a number comparison task. View a video clip here |
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March 23rd 2009:
 On 13-3-2009, The Social Interactions Project held a highly successful event entitled 'The Science of Social Interaction' in collaboration with Glasgow's Science Centre. It was attended by over 200 pupils from schools throughout Scotland. The event showcased the psychology of first impressions and their consequences, and comprised of a number of hands-on demonstrations and topical exhibits, which provided the visiting pupils with exposure to real science they might not otherwise experience. View the site here |
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March 19th 2009:
 David Simmons appears in the BBC4 documentary "Britain's Best Drives" (BBC 4, 8.30pm, Thursday 26th March). David talks to the presenter, actor and former Glasgow University rector Richard Wilson, about the psychology behind why people like looking at mountain scenery. Shown is a picture of David with Richard taken at the end of filming by the banks of Loch Katrine last July. |
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March 6th 2009:
 Lorna Morrow (with Jane Mackenzie (Learning and Teaching Centre) and Rob McKerlie (GU Dental School)) has developed a new on-line resource, called 'beSoTLed', to support staff who wish to explore their teaching practice and its impact on the learning of their students in a scholarly way through engaging in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) - view the site here |
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February 20th 2009:
 Darwin Illusion - To commemorate Darwin Day, Rob Jenkins (University of Glasgow) and Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire) teamed up to create an unusual optical illusion. The Darwin Illusion website attracted 50,000 visitors in the first 24 hours. "People are fascinated by illusions. This internet release shows just how quickly an idea can spread", said Dr. Jenkins. "The tipping point was when Stephen Fry plugged the illusion on his Twitter", added Prof. Wiseman. The Darwin Illusion can be seen here. |
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February 20th 2009:
 Rob Jenkins (University of Glasgow) and Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire) teamed up for the cover feature of the February 14th issue of New Scientist magazine. Thousands of people took part in a unique online experiment that links appearances with personality. "People are inclined to associate certain looks with certain character traits", said Dr. Jenkins. "The question is whether or not they are accurate". "The implications are huge", added Prof. Wiseman. "From court appearances to interviews, first impressions are important for us to understand." Read more about the research at the New Scientist Website |
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December 16th 2008:
 "First impressions: The science of social interaction" by Rob Jenkins (on the right) and Simon Garrod appears in the ESRC's flagship publication, "Britain In 2009". The article ties in with the department's ESRC/MRC-funded large grant "Social interaction: A cognitive neuroscience approach". You can access "Britain In 2009" at WH Smiths, Borders, Waitrose, Sainsbury, and Tesco. |
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December 16th 2008:
 David Kelly and Roberto Caldara (on the right) have recently been awarded an ESRC grant of £81,767 to investigate 'The impact of culture on perception and face processing during development'. |
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November 24th 2008:
 Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (CCNi) /
Social Interactions Project Launch Event:
On Friday 28th November 2008 we are launching the new ‘Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging’ (CCNi) and officially launching our project ‘Social Interaction: a cognitive neurosciences approach’ which is jointly-funded by ESRC and MRC, and associated with CCNi. |
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November 17th 2008:
 Linda Moxey and Tony Sanford have just obtained an ESRC grant of £79,918 for one year to examine "Using scenario-mapping theory to predict plural reference". |
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November 13th 2008:
 Amanda Neil and David Robertson are the joint winners of the Alastair Weir Prize for the best academic performance in third year honours. They received their cash prizes from Mike Burton, our HoD, at a recent ceremony in the Department. |
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November 13th 2008:
 Congratulations to Emanuele de Luca (a new M.Sc. student in our Department) who has been awarded €2000 by the Italian academic foundation Fondazione G. Ronchi for his paper “Studio dei tempi di reazione su compiti di scelta che richiedono l’identificazioner dei volta...” |
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November 13th 2008:
 Vincenzo Romei, Micah Murray and Gregor Thut have been awarded the poster prize at the Third International Conference on TMS and DCS in Göttingen. Their poster’s title is: “Looming sounds selectively and pre-consciously enhance visual cortex excitability.” |
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November 13th 2008:
 Ian Bushnell has joined the organising committee of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology and chairs the Training & Development subcommittee responsible for a programme of CPD events throughout the year. |
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November 13th 2008:
 Postgraduate students at Glasgow enthusiastically settling into their first Matlab tutorial of the session. |
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November 13th 2008:
 Mike Burton’s end of award report for his ESRC grant “Individual variation in face perception” has just earned him an ‘outstanding’ rating by the Evaluation Directorate. (Award jointly held with Allan McNeill). The report can be found here. |
