Since 2001, the group has
received research funding from a wide variety of sources, including several of
the Research Councils, a number of medical charities, and the police service. They have published 59 journal articles (and 13
book chapters).
Beaman, with support from the British Academy, LTSN, Nuffield Foundation, Royal Society and Wellcome Trust, has investigated interactions between memory and cognition. His model predicts when working memory will attenuate distraction effects. He has demonstrated distinct, parallel routes for processing unattended speech and separable roles for left and right superior temporal gyri in acoustic masking. With support from the Leverhulme Foundation, he has also shown when and why limited knowledge produces more accurate decision-making than full recognition.
Butler (with Berry), with support from the ESRC, MRC, BBSRC, NERC, Nuffield Foundation and British Academy, has shown that the enhanced attitude to stimuli produced by 'mere exposure' does not apply to words, hence distinguishing its mechanism from that involved in perceptually based processes such as repetition priming. Using fMRI, he (with Koutstaal) has demonstrated the role of the amygdala in generating mere exposure effects. As part of a large interdisciplinary research project with Agriculture, Plant Sciences and Food Bioscience, he (with Harvey) has identified the psychological barriers that inhibit consumers from buying more healthy and locally produced foods.
Ellis
and Freeman’s group, with support from the ESRC, Nuffield Foundation and
British Academy, has characterised the development, maintenance and decline of memory for actions to be carried out in the future
('prospective memory') in healthy and impaired
older adults. They have shown the
superiority of action-based recall over verbal report in tests of prospective
memory in young and older adults. On the basis of their behavioural studies
they have proposed, and subsequently confirmed using fMRI, the existence of
preparatory motor activity during the encoding of future intended acts. With support from the Alzheimer’s Society, they have also shown that
older adults, while showing no deficit in their ability to access already
completed intentions, are less able than young adults to recall intended
actions. They have also demonstrated independent deterioration in acquisition
and consolidation of memories in individuals with 'Mild Cognitive Impairment'
and Alzheimer's disease.
Gaffan,
with support from the BBSRC and the Wellcome Trust, has used an innovative
testing environment to analyse the neural basis of visual and visuospatial
processing. She has revealed complementary functions of rodent perirhinal and
postrhinal cortex (analogous to human perirhinal and parahippocampal cortex).
She has devised a novel paradigm to dissociate the contribution of hippocampus
and entorhinal cortex to visuospatial processing, from their involvement in
controlling spatially directed action. Gaffan (with Murray), with support from
the ESRC, has also elucidated precursors of shared attention in human infants,
demonstrating that social experience with carers at 6 months (i.e. before the
age when true attention-sharing appears), but not before, contributes to its
later emergence.
Koutstaal,
with support from the ESRC, the Nuffield Foundation, and the RETF, has provided
new cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuroanatomical insights into the level
of specificity of mental representation of objects and events, and the factors
constraining adaptively flexible movement between detailed (item-specific) and
abstract (category-based) representations. She has demonstrated that healthy
older adults show intact category-based memory, but reduced ability to move
flexibly between item-specific and category-based remembering. Using fMRI, she
has shown brain laterality differences in the preferential processing of
item-specific versus category-based object information, and a
posterior-to-anterior progression in left occipitotemporal cortex in the level
of responsiveness to visually-based versus lexical-semantic differences between
exemplars.
Richardson has exploited a simple eye movement monitoring technique to uncover subtle and unexpected aspects of attention, memory and prior knowledge. He has also shown that the cognitive processes of conversation, collaboration and social interaction can be revealed in the coordination of speakers' and listeners' eye movements.