Current PhD project opportunities in the School of Psychology
The School has a range of specific research project opportunities available. A summary of each of these projects and the lead supervisor associated with them is detailed below. Please contact the lead supervisor directly using the email available on their webpages provided below for more information about specific projects.
If candidates have their own project ideas, they are welcome to directly approach relevant colleagues who may be found under research groupings here.
Alternatively, please contact the School’s Postgraduate Research Lead Dr Sue Sherman (s.m.sherman@keele.ac.uk) for assistance.
| Title | Supervisor | Project summary |
|---|---|---|
| Using EEG Decoding to study the Temporal Dynamics of Visual Perceptual Organisation | Dr Joseph Brooks | This project will investigate how visual processing and organisation of visual information into objects unfolds in the brief hundreds of milliseconds between sensory exposure and conscious experience. The project will employ advanced multivariate pattern analysis methods of EEG data as well as psychophysical studies. Ultimately, the work will inform theories of visual perception and approaches to computer vision. |
| The Moral Psychology of Artificial Intelligence (AI) | Dr Kathryn Francis |
Moral psychologists often investigate moral decision-making using moral dilemmas. In these dilemmas, you are asked to imagine a difficult situation and decide which action is the morally correct one to take. Increasingly, we are seeing the application of AI in these morally-relevant contexts. For example, consider the decisions that may be required by a self-driving car, an online chatbot, and even a nursing or triage AI robot. Research has investigated the extent to which people find moral decisions made by AI morally acceptable although this has been constrained to a handful of contexts. In this project area, we are interested in how people judge decisions made by AI across several contexts and in situations where there is a moral conflict between two outcomes. We are also interested in identifying factors that affect whether people give moral status to AI agents. This project would be of interest to individuals looking to work within an interdisciplinary field (moral psychology) which incorporates theories and methods from social psychology, cognitive psychology, and experimental philosophy. |
| Investigating the Impact of Depression Symptomatology on Perceptual Categorisation | Dr Jim Grange | This project will investigate the effects of depression on perceptual categorisation learning, a vital cognitive skill that has applications in both everyday life and professional settings. We aim to unravel the complex interplay between perception, attention, memory, reasoning, and decision-making in the context of depression symptomatology. This PhD project will build upon existing theoretical developments in cognitive psychology and employ techniques to quantify the underlying processes in categorisation, and how they are affected by depression symptomatology. As one of the first projects to comprehensively study this relationship, you will have a unique opportunity to advance our understanding of how depression symptomatology affects perceptual categorisation and the coordination of cognitive processes. |
|
Neural markers of cognition in deaf and hearing infants |
Dr Claire Monroy | Little is known about how being born without access to sound affects general cognitive development in babies. This project will use electroencephalography (EEG) to characterize the neural activity that underpins cognitive development in deaf infants and a comparison group of hearing infants. We will examine oscillatory activity and event-related potentials to unveil the patterns of brain activity that indicate learning, memory, and attentional factors involved in cognition. |
| The dissociation between our subjective experience and objective measures of perceptual organization | Dr Einat Rashal | Recent studies show that a dissociation exists between our conscious experience and the indirect measures that we use to study organizational processes in visual perception. This adds to the already complex nature of the study of perceptual organization, as the main concepts of a “whole”, “gestalt”, or “objecthood” are ill-defined, referring to a quality of an object that is different from the quality of the individual elements it is composed of. This project will test the hypothesis that the dissociation involves different representations in separate pathways, one leading to the percept we can report and another to the motor system. A competing hypothesis follows a probabilistic model relating subjective reports to objective discrimination and categorization measures of perception. The main method will be psychophysical studies, however, adding EEG and modeling can be discussed. |
| The effect of video games on prejudice reduction and pro-social behaviour | Dr Chris Stiff |
Video games are a ubiquitous form of entertainment, and are often unfairly maligned as a source of aggressive or anti-social behaviour. In this project, we will add to the growing body of evidence that shows video games can actually have a very positive effect on players, especially in terms of intergroup relations. The PhD will use video games as a contact medium for individuals belonging to different groups, and will investigate how playing collaboratively can reduce prejudice intergroup prejudice. Some possible investigative themes are:
The extant research is limited on this topic, meaning there is considerable scope for a PhD. The findings should also provide a pathway to impact through the application of findings to real-world situations. |
| Understanding and addressing police legitimacy | Professor Clifford Stott | The Baroness Casey Review (2023) highlighted a legitimacy crisis confronting police forces, not just in London but in the UK and internationally. The recently published Crime Survey of England & Wales also showed significant declines in key measures of public perceptions of the police. Understanding and addressing the factors governing public perceptions of the legitimacy of policing is therefore a key priority for police forces locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally across the coming years. This project will utilise a mixed methods or fully qualitative approach to seek to address these challenges through the application of both Social Identity and Procedural Justice perspectives to develop theory-led, innovative research-informed solutions. Integral to the work will be knowledge co-production - the practice of academics, policing partners and stakeholders working together to shape priorities and activities - combining practical expertise, academic knowledge, and stakeholder perspectives to address the full range of challenges faced by modern policing. |
| Musical autobiographies: Investigating personal and collective memories for music over |
Professor Alexandra Lamont | Why can specific pieces of music evoke such powerful emotional responses in |