Dr. Simon Thompson, Associate Professor in Clinical Psychology & Neuropsychology will be undertaking a sponsored visit to New York University early next year to study cortisol testing to inform his research on the neurology of yawning. The funding was awarded as the result of a successful bid to the Santander Scholarship Scheme.  Dr. Thompson has also recently submitted a European Grant to the French National Research Agency to lead as PI the development of psycho-education packages in Alzheimer’s disease together with a team of researchers and clinicians in Central France. If successful, the funding is in the region of £750,000.

The study, named Go Far (Going Outdoors: Falls, Ageing & Resilience), will be a year-long pilot study with seven other research centres. Working with Dr. Ballinger (University of Southampton) and Professor Phillips (Swansea University), Dr. Nyman’s contribution will be to explore through focus groups older people’s perceptions of the key risk factors for falling in the outdoor environment. This aspect of the project will lead to an understanding of the environmental risk factors which have yet to be accounted for in the current evidence base. Overall, the project will develop a greater understanding of the many factors involved  in outdoor falls and create practical tools which will significantly help older people’s health and wellbeing.

Sarah Bate of the Psychology Centre has been approached by both The Guardian newspaper and a women’s magazine to write a feature on her face recognition research.  As a neuropsychologist, Sarah focuses on patients who have a disorder known as Prosopagnosia – face blindness. The media interest follows celebrity interest earlier in the year as Duncan Bannatyne tweeted of his particular difficulties with face recognition, drawing attention to Sarah’s research pages, which you can visit here: http://prosopagnosiaresearch.org/

This talk will highlight how Psychology can help teachers and lecturers understand the role of current and future technology for students and for their learning.  The first part of this talk will reflect upon the changes to the psychology student body, in relation to the way technology has affected their academic and social needs, skills and experiences.  It is 10 years since Prensky (2001) coined the terms ‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’. This talk will consider the differences between students entering FE/HE this year to those entering 10, 20 and 30 years ago, when many current teachers and lecturers began their teaching careers. ‘Millennial’ students have grown up using the internet not just for learning (e.g. VLEs), but for communicating and socialising (social networking), and for entertainment (gaming). The second part of this talk will review research linking these new social media to education.

For example, Gee (2004) highlights how video games can be used to help learning and literacy. My own work (Taylor, 2010) has discussed the links between location-independent online learning and emotion and individual differences. Research by Kirschner & Karpinski (2010) showed how social networking could be used in education and how this related to academic performance.  Finally, some potential visions for the future will be proposed where I will draw on recent neuroscience research (e.g. Greenfield, 2010; Carr, 2010) to discuss how using the internet could be biologically changing the way students think and how an understanding of this can be used to design new learning experiences.

Dr. Ben Parris and Dr. Alisdair Taylor have been successful in gaining Nuffield Foundation Research Bursaries to work with two of our undergraduates on research projects over the summer. Ben’s project will investigate the effects of ruminative anxiety on sustained attention in an oculomotor Stroop task; and Alisdair’s project will examine the influence of different task instructions and priming on antisaccade performance in healthy young and healthy older adults.