Background

I did an undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science at UCLA, where I worked with Keith Holyoak on analogical reasoning and Nancy Kanwisher on visual attention. I then moved to Princeton for my PhD with Anne Treisman, also on visual attention. The next two years I spent in Nancy Kanwisher’s lab at MIT, where I began doing fMRI research on attention and on the organisation of visual cortex. Since 2000 I have been on the faculty of the School of Psychology at the University of Wales, Bangor, where I am a member of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience. Since 2008 I have been Research Director of the College of Health and Behavioural Sciences, of which Psychology is a member School.

Research

At the broadest level, I am interested in understanding how the brain deals with one of its most complex problems -- understanding other people. With my students and colleagues we have focused on the earlier perceptual stages of this process, such as how people perceive faces and bodies and their movements. Recently in collaboration with Steve Tipper I've extended this research into studies of the shared visual/motor representations of bodily actions

In terms of methods, our main research tool has been and continues to be fMRI; our studies use traditional blocked and event-related designs, and, more recently, multivoxel pattern analysis approaches. Recently I have also collaborated on ERP studies of body and face perception with Guillaume Thierry, and I am developing a new line of research that will use TMS and fMRI conjointly (in collaboration with Tipper, Bob Rafal, and Martin Giese) to study action perception.

Our research has previously been funded by the BBSRC, and is currently funded by ESRC, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Wales Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Teaching

I have taught undergraduates on a variety of topics, including human neuropsychology, memory, reasoning and decision making, and cognitive neuroscience. At the master's level I have led seminar classes on current issues in the neuroscience of high-level vision. A large part of my teaching involves the supervision of undergraduate student projects. Project groups from previous years have investigated visual attention and the neural basis of scene perception. My current student groups are investigating how extended affective experiences are represented in memory. I have also supervised a number of MSc thesis projects, four of which have resulted in published articles.

My full CV is available here. PDFs of most papers are available here.