Brain Cognition and Development Research Cluster

The research cluster of Brain, Cognition and Development encompasses a number of research groups whose work is concerned with how we perceive, learn, process and retain information, and how these processes change and develop over time, or are influenced by neurological or biological factors.

Our work on perception, attention and memory includes theoretical work exploring time perception, attentional capture and control, spatial and temporal aspects of attention and the influence of statistical learning and implicit learning on attention. Our work ranges from relatively low-level visual cognition (e.g. visual masking) to high level tasks (e.g. visual search in the real world). The hearing research group explores how we perceive and process sound, and how this is affected by factors such as hearing impairment, cognition, age, cochlear implants, and other sensory information.

Real work application is the aim of much of our work, and this is particularly the case in relation to transport research in psychology, where we consider the impact of driver training and assessment on driver behaviour and accident reduction, and also aging and lifespan development, where we consider the experience of aging in relation to physical mobility and intellectual function. Developmental psychology is also part of the work we do in language, literacy and psycholinguistics, where we examine how written and spoken language ability develops over time, and how it can go wrong.

We approach biological and neurological psychological research from the perspective of seeing the person as a whole system – an embodied brain, where our psychological processes are necessarily impacted by biological influences, from neurotransmission to the bacteria in our gut.

More details on each of the research groups in this cluster can be found here:

• Affect, Personality and the Embodied Brain
• Hearing Research Group