Supervisors Offering Bursaries

125th Anniversary Studentships

Dr. Stephan Boehm and Professor Bob Rafal

Investigating the new role of the medial temporal lobe for nondeclarative memory

(Please note that the recipient of this bursary will also receive an award from the School of Psychology in order to fully fund a 3-year PhD. The 125th anniversary PhD bursaries provide an annual allowance of £5,000 and an annual research allowance of up to £1,500 (for approved expenditure). The School of Psychology will also provide an annual stipend and tuition fees will be waived. International students are welcome to apply, but funding will only be available at the Home / EU level.)

The medial temporal lobe, especially the hippocampus, has been considered the key brain structure for declarative memory, the ability to learn facts about the world as well as store episodes from our life. Priming, a fast-occurring and long-lasting benefit in processing information and other forms of nondeclarative memory, in contrast, have been shown to be independent of the medial temporal lobe. The goal of the proposed research is to investigate these new, medial-temporal-lobe associated forms of priming in healthy adults and memory-impaired patients by comparing them with classical, well-studied forms of priming, in order to delineate the specific cognitive operations and neural computations that underlie them.
s.boehm@bangor.ac.uk

Dr Tracey Bywater, Dr Dave Daley, Prof Judy Hutchings and Prof Jane Noyes

Enhancing school readiness among preschool children

Recently, researchers and policy makers have expressed the concern that preschoolers’ behavior problems may significantly compromise their chances for later success in school (Gilliam, 2005; Raver, 2002). Young children who are persistently sad, withdrawn, or disruptive have been found to receive less instruction, to have fewer opportunities for learning from peers, and to be less engaged and less positive about their role as learners (Arnold et al., 2006). Young children experiencing economic disadvantage may be at particularly high risk.

Given the consequences of behavioral difficulty for children’s school readiness, preschool classrooms are an increasingly important service setting outside the home (Spoth, Kavanagh, & Dishion, 2002) in which to help to address these early difficulties and support the establishment of effective school readiness skills.

The aim of this PhD would be to build on previous research collaboration between the research team on evaluating parent based interventions for parents, teachers and foster carers. The aim is to evaluate a new four-session parent training programme aimed at enhancing school readiness. This programme is focused on helping parents to support their child’s learning at home and to foster home school partnerships. The PhD project will support a small scale study in order to survey factors related to school readiness in preschool children, develop and test appropriate measures of school readiness for preschool children, and then conduct a small scale pilot study to test the efficacy of the new intervention.
d.daley@bangor.ac.uk

Dr Amy Hayes, Dr Stephan Boehm , Professor Steve Tipper

Simultaneous recording of EEG and facial EMG to measure implicit affect evoked by actions
Recording muscle activity in the face (facial EMG) is a technique that has been used to measure implicit affective responses to stimuli. The experience of positive affect has been found to be associated with muscle activity in the cheek muscle that controls smiling, and the experience of negative affect is associated with activity in the brow muscle that controls frowning. Using this technique, we have recently shown that positive emotion is evoked by executing fluent, as compared to non-fluent, motor responses (Cannon, Hayes & Tipper, in press). The proposed research is to replicate the above experiment while simultaneously recording EEG. The purpose is to investigate the cognitive and neural processes that are associated with affect evoked by perceptual-motor processes. We would analyse the EEG signal according to whether high or low levels of emotion were evoked, as measured by the facial EMG. We would analyse early and late components of the ERP, in order to assess, for example, whether affect is evoked by planning of the action, or if it is related more to execution or post-response analysis of the action.
a.hayes@bangor.ac.uk

Dr. Charles Leek, Dr. John Hindle, Dr. Martyn Bracewell

The effects of Parkinson Disease on high-level visuo-spatial processing.

The PhD will extend current knowledge about the effects of Parkinson’s disease (PD) on high-level visuo-spatial processing. The central focus of the project concerns the determinants of individual variation in visuo-spatial processing impairments associated with PD - an important, and yet, poorly understood aspect of the illness. My research shows that while large group-level differences in mental rotation ability are found in the PD patients relative to controls, analyses at the single subject level show strikingly different patterns of preserved and impaired performance across tasks. This suggests that group-level analyses of PD performance in some measures of cognitive skills may mask more complex underlying patterns of deficits in individual patients. Such variation is of considerable clinical relevance to understanding the causes of cognitive impairment in PD and disease outcome.
e.c.leek@bangor.ac.uk
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Dr D. Markland

Persuasive communications and implicit exercise attitudes
Understanding determinants of exercise adoption and maintenance has become a major focus of research in health and exercise psychology. The study of attitudes towards physical activity has been prominent in this endeavour. The majority of this research has been framed within the context of value-expectancy models which posit that attitudes are determined by conscious, deliberative consideration of the benefits and costs associated with engaging in a behaviour and the personal value placed upon the outcomes of the behaviour. Recent advances in social cognition, however, have highlighted the importance of non-conscious processes in behaviour. The aims of the proposed PhD programme are first to refine and assess the validity of an exercise-related Implicit Associations Test that I have developed and second to explore the viability of potential methods of fostering positive implicit attitudes toward exercise among sedentary individuals. Specifically, a series of experimental studies will be conducted in which representational features of persuasive exercise communications will be systematically manipulated and compared to determine (a) whether such communications can positively impact implicit exercise attitudes, (b) the optimal representational features of such communications, and (c) whether change in implicit attitudes translates into behaviour change.
d.a.marlkand@bangor.ac.uk

Professor Oliver Turnbull

Emotional learning in amnesia

The last half-century has produced a vast literature on episodic memory systems, and their (hippocampally-mediated) biological underpinnings. There has also been a substantial literature on other memory systems, such as semantic or procedural skills, that are independent of episodic memory. However, despite a century-long anecdotal history (beginning with Claparade), the role for emotion-based learning systems, the role of emotion-mediated memory, has been far less investigated. In the last several years my group have published several papers on this topic (Evans-Roberts & Turnbull, under review; Turnbull & Evans, 2006; Turnbull et al, 2006), demonstrating that patients with profound anterograde amnesia (following hippocampal damage) show substantial emotion-related learning, persisting across substantial periods of time. In one case, the patient (Turnbull & Evans, 2006) was able to learn complex contingency relationships, tracking multiple objects whose emotional consequences changed unpredictably across time, at levels no different to controls, over a period of several weeks. In sum, these systems appear able to encode, and sustain, more sophisticated patterns of valence-learning than have previously been reported.

The proposed study will study the (previously un-investigated) issue of how emotions are modified in the patchy and distorted recall of these amnesic patients. In particular, the study seeks to establish whether specific classes of emotion are (1) better recalled (is sadness more ‘memorable’ than happiness?), (2) do specific emotions prime each other (does fear tend to prime anger or sadness?), and (3) whether these patterns of memory error relate to pre-morbid personality (are the pre-morbidly depressed better able to recall sad stories?)

o.turnbull@bangor.ac.uk