Tag Archives: DEC

BPS Wessex Student Conference

Posted in BU research, PG research, Psychology by andrewjohnson

On Saturday, Bournemouth University hosted the Wessex Branch of the British Psychological Society (BPS) Annual Student Conference. This event provided an opportunity for students to showcase novel research and, in addition to BU, attracted Psychology students from a range of institutions (e.g. Universities of Surrey, Sussex, Winchester, and Southampton). The breadth of institution was matched by the breadth of student; with undergraduate research assistants through to doctoral students presenting their work to an audience of approximately 100 delegates.

In total, there were 28 oral presentations and 19 research posters. In addition, we were fortunate to have two thought-provoking keynote speakers. First, Dr. Richard Stephens (Keele University) spoke about the role of swearing on pain tolerance (in short, it helps, particularly if you are normally an infrequent user of coarse vocabulary) and, second, Prof. Clare Wood (Coventry University) delivered a presentation on the effects of text messaging on literacy (in sum, ‘textisms’ are not rotting the brains of our nation’s youth).

The conference sought to emphasise that, rather than a perfunctory assessment exercise, student research is an important part of knowledge creation within our universities. Whilst this was highlighted by the collaborative (student-academic) nature of the projects, it was also evident how the presenters had developed into independent researchers. This apprenticeship model is one employed by the Bournemouth Psychology Research Centre and it was pleasing to see a number of our Year 2 Psychology students presenting data that had arisen from their research assistant placements. There was a large contingent of first and second year BU Psychology students in the audience and helping with conference organisation as volunteers. We hope that they have been inspired to participate in more staff projects and will return next year to present their research.

PhD Student from DEC presenting at the House of Commons, Westminster London

Posted in BU research by Corrina Dickson

Mayank Anand a Post-Graduate Research Student at School of Design, Engineering & Computing, BU has been selected by the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee to present his research work to the Members of both Houses of Parliament at Westminster during National Science and Engineering week. In the current research, Mayank is working with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), Head Quartered at Poole, Dorset. The project involves examining the real-time quality of lubricants used in lifeboats of RNLI. This is an industry based PhD in which he spent part of the time at the RNLI HQ working closely with engineering team. The research is also in-kind supported by BP Technology Centre, Pangbourne U.K.

Mayank said, “I see this upcoming event as a great opportunity for an early-stage researcher like me, where one can showcase his/her work and ideas alongside getting invaluable feedback from the judges. Networking will be an added bonus”. He added “the support from the supervisory team at university including Prof Mark Hadfield, Dr Ben Thomas, Sustainable Design Research Team, and the RNLI has been a key in producing good research outputs and gaining confidence to present to a wider mass”.
At the event, Mayank will also be competing against 60 other participants within Engineering and Science session for the prestigious Engineering Medal and 180 others for Westminster Medal for the overall winner as a part of National Competition.

Dr Andrew Mayers’ research on children’s sleep receives excellent media coverage

Posted in BU research, Psychology by Julie Northam

Throughout November, the work that Dr Andrew Mayers (a Senior Lecturer in Psychology, in the school of Design, Engineering and Computing) has been doing with children’s sleep has been receiving a great deal of attention on national television and on national and local radio. Over the last few years, Andrew has been running a series of sleep workshops with parents, in a unique partnership with Winton Primary School and Barnardo’s Bournemouth Children’s Centres. Over that time, there have been several reports in the local press about the work, but it is only in the last six months that this has received national attention, starting in July with articles in the Times Educational Supplement (TES: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6264998) and Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2180003/Parents-offered-child-sleep-classes-pupils-turn-lessons-tired.html) and a live interview with Talk Radio Europe (http://www.talkradioeurope.com/clients/amayers.mp3). However, it is this last month that the attention has become more intense, with two features on national television and four live interviews on BBC radio (including one session at 12.30am!).

ITV Daybreak, November 1st: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd_OaMieSks

BBC Radio 5 Live, Drive show, November 16th http://www.andrewmayers.info/Radio5Nov162012.mp3

BBC Radio 5 Live, Tony Livesey late night show, November 21st http://www.andrewmayers.info/Radio5Nov212012.mp3

BBC1 Breakfast/BBC News Channel, November 21st http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-20423289

BBC Radio Sheffield, November 21st http://www.andrewmayers.info/RadioSheffieldNov212012.mp3

BBC Radio Solent, November 21st http://www.andrewmayers.info/RadioSolentNov212012.mp3

Andrew has been reflecting on these experiences. He said “I am extremely grateful for the incredibly hard work put in to these workshops by Pat Bate at Winton Primary School and Patrick Ives at Barnardo’s – without them this would not have happened. It is also testimony to the effectiveness of a good personal web page. Much of the initial media attention came about because a journalist was conducting research online about children’s sleep, and found my web page. The rest is history!”

Andrew’s website can be found at: www.andrewmayers.info

Andrew also said “Once a website like this is established, it is important to keep it updated, especially when there is a chance of media attention. A few days after the BBC features, I noticed that visits to my website increased six-fold in the first day, and is still well above normal levels of traffic. As a result of the media attention and increased web site visits, I have established several potentially very lucrative new partnerships with leading academics in the field, some with a very high profile media presence. I also received support and requests for collaboration with several educational psychologists and other professionals across the UK”.

Research by BU’s Dr Andrew Mayers will appear on ITV Daybreak this Thursday

Posted in BU research by Julie Northam

In a bid to tackle children’s sleep problems, BU’s Dr Andrew Mayers in the School of Design, Engineering and Computing, has been running workshops for parents at Bournemouth primary schools for several years now. The workshops started because staff at Winton Primary School noticed that pupils were struggling to get through the day without falling asleep, and were often difficult to engage because of tiredness. Andrew welcomed the opportunity to work with the school, an activity that reflects the ambition of the university to undertake more public engagement. The success of these workshops have been receiving a great deal of national media attention, with previously reported features in the Daily Mail, TES, and an interview with Talk Radio Europe. To follow on from that, Andrew’s work with children’s sleep at Winton Primary School will feature on ITV Daybreak on Thursday November 1st, as part of a series that the channel is showing across the week. It is due to be aired at around 6.50am. While Andrew welcomes the media attention, he hopes that this will help publicise his ambition to develop a professional online resource for children’s sleep, working in collaboration with some of the leading UK sleep charities.

Intranasal inhalation of oxytocin improves eye-witness identification: RDF grant report

Posted in BU research, Featured academics, Post-award, Psychology, Research news by Sarah Bate

In 2011 myself and Ben Parris from the Psychology Research Centre were awarded a small RDF grant to investigate whether intranasal inhalation of the hormone oxytocin can improve eye-witness identification.  We designed an experiment where participants viewed a short video-clip of a perpetrator stealing a wallet from someone’s bag.  Participants then inhaled either an oxytocin or placebo nasal spray, and after a 45 minute interval to allow central oxytocin levels to plateau, were presented with a line-up of ten faces from which they had to either select the perpetrator or state that he was absent.  To date we have tested 70 participants and found a facilitation in the oxytocin condition.  In a second experiment, we asked participants to complete the ‘One-in-Ten’ task, a test of spontaneous eye-witness memory that has been well-used in previous work.  Again, we found a clear facilitation in performance in the oxytocin condition.

These findings follow recent work that has demonstrated that oxytocin can improve face recognition performance in standard cognitive tasks in lab-based settings.  In addition, work from our lab is currently under review for publication demonstrating that oxytocin can improve face recognition in individuals with prosopagnosia (face blindness).  This RDF grant has therefore given us the funding to carry out key investigations demonstrating novel applications of oxytocin inhalation in more applied settings.

I also presented findings from the oxytocin project at the April meeting of the Experimental Psychological Society, and was delighted to meet Dr Markus Bindemann from the University of Kent who is something of an expert in eye-witness identification.  We are now collaborating with Markus, and have plans to develop a bid to the Leverhulme Trust on the back of the publications that we hope will result from these investigations.  We are also about to welcome a new PhD student to our lab, who will be further developing the forensic aspect of this work in more real-world national security settings.

The pump-priming that was made available to us via the RDF scheme has provided us with the opportunity to collect the initial data and publication basis that we need to develop a large external bid, and we hope that this is the beginning of a fruitful line of research for our laboratory.

Reducing sleep problems in children – BU’s Dr Andrew Mayers’ research features in the TES

Posted in BU research, Psychology by Julie Northam

Over the past couple of years BU’s Dr Andrew Mayers in the School of Design, Engineering and Computing, has been working with Bouremouth primary schools to try and reduce sleep problems in school children. Working in schools, sleep is probably the most common problem that is reported by teachers, head-teachers and staff, and Andrew stresses the importance of all children receiving enough sleep to prevent adverse effects on their education and health. He conducted the workshops after school staff noticed pupils were struggling to get through the day without falling asleep.

Andrew is currently exploring the possibility of conducting studies that examine the mental health and well-being of children, including how poor sleep affects their emotional, cognitive, social and educational development. He hopes the outcomes will help to offer a clearer understanding of the implications of sleep deprivation in children.

You can read the full TES article here: Can’t sleep, won’t sleep (published 27 July 2012).

Andrew’s research also featured in the Daily Mail: Parents offered ‘get your child to sleep’ classes as pupils turn up to lessons too tired (published 27 July 2012).

Andrew’s website is available here: http://andrewmayers.info/

Find out about the ‘Wayfinding & Spatial Cognition’ Lab in Psychology

Posted in BU research, Psychology by Jan Wiener

Successful spatial navigating is one of the most fundamental behavioural problems and requires complex cognitive operations. To navigate in both familiar and unfamiliar environments, we need to monitor various internal and external cues, build, access, and update mental representations of space, plan and execute movements. In the Wayfinding & Spatial Cognition Lab we conduct research into the psychological processes underlying navigation and wayfinding behaviour addressing both fundamental and applied research questions. We make use of a variety of methods including behavioural navigation experiments, virtual reality techniques, static and mobile eye-tracking and cognitive modelling.

Click on image to see a short video of our virtual reality setup that we now combined with a head mounted (mobile) eye-tracker. This allows us to study visual attention across a large field of view while participants solve navigation tasks in highly controlled virtual environments that are build to exactly match the experimental demands.

The “Wayfinding & Spatial Cognition Lab” is currently involved in a number of fundamental and applied research projects:-

 

 

 

 

  • We just received funding from “Army of Angels” and the BU Foundation to start an exciting new project investigating the relationship between PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and navigation.

 

Dr. Jan Wiener in the Psychology Research Centre leads the “Wayfinding and Spatial Cognition” lab. For more information about our projects, the team, and our publications, please visit our lab page at www.spatial-cognition.org. You can also follow us on Twitter.

We are always eager to discuss new project ideas and collaborations, so please get in contact by dropping me an email: jwiener@bournemouth.ac.uk

First grant proposal submitted

Posted in Awarded & submitted bids, BU research, Computer Science by Indre Zliobaite

I joined DEC as a lecturer about a year ago. My research focuses on mining streaming data. We are building predictive models (e.g. to recommend an interesting text to a user) that can diagnose themselves and automatically adapt to changes in data over time.

This week I submitted my first grant proposal as a principal investigator. When I was asked to share my experiences on preparing the proposal, I thought I’d rather wait for the outcome. Still, in this post I will share some experiences and tips for those planning to apply for their first grant, which I think are valid no matter if my proposal gets funded.

Start early. Preparing the proposal took about six months. I started drafting the proposal back in October-November. In November I attended an excellent internal workshop on bidding given by Dr. Martin Pickard. I highly recommend to attend his workshops if you have an opportunity. They give you an insight perspective on bidding processes.

Decide about the funding program and stick to it (right after you have an idea about the content and potential collaborators). I have some experience in preparing proposals at my previous institutions (not as a PI, including successful bids), The content requirements seem to vary a lot. So you need to tailor your proposal. I picked the First Grant Scheme within EPSRC, which is a very nice option for early career researchers. The proposals are evaluated only against other early career researchers and no previous experience as a PI is expected.

Decide what you want to get from the bid. A research assistant? Equipment? Contact RKE OPS right from the start, you may be surprised how little fits under the estimated budget, because there are overheads. For instance, the funding cap for the First Grant within EPSRC is 125 TGBP, which effectively means that you can budget a research assistant for up to one year, some of your time, maybe some equipment or some traveling and that’s it. RKE OPS will give you advices on the financial side and help you to do your budget. Your budget restricts how much content you can plan for the proposal to be realistic and feasible, so this should be one of the first decisions to make.

Get as much feedback as you can. During the process I got three reviews from the internal review process (the RPRS, contact Caroline O’Kane), multiple feedbacks from Caroline herself, feedbacks from my line manager, feedbacks from the organizer and the participants of an external workshop on bidding that I attended, and from Dr. Martin Pickard by phone as a follow up of the workshop in November. All this feedback was extremely valuable and helped me to shape my proposal. That also gave a perspective how people from different fields see the proposal and which parts need to be clarified. I must say incorporating the feedback was much more challenging than writing the first draft. Naturally, there were quite some opposing comments and contradicting views by different people. First I was confused, but later I found that extremely valuable, as that helped me to form a big picture of the bidding philosophy.

I’ve learned a lot during this process. I am very grateful to all the reviewers and the research support people for their support. Thanks!

DEC are awarded funding for an industry visiting professor from the Royal Academy of Engineering!

Posted in Featured academics, Research news by Julie Northam

Dr Tania Humphries-Smith has successfully bid to the Royal Academy of Engineering for an industry visiting professor. This  project will fund a Visiting Professor in Employer Engagement (£80K)  and will last for four years. The RAE Visiting Professor is Simon Vaitkevicius, an engineer with over 15 years of experience working globally for Nokia. The VP will be an important element in enabling the Design and Engineering group with the School of DEC to develop exceptional levels of real-world learning opportunities.

The role of the VP will be comprised of a number of activities:

  • Broker relationships between BU and new industrial enterprises for the purpose of – providing ‘live’ undergraduate projects both for 1st and 2nd year entire cohort project briefs and for final year individual project briefs; providing potential masters level ‘live’ research projects and for developing proposals for match funded PhD projects.
  • Deliver lectures and presentations to undergraduate and postgraduate students on current industrial practice particularly with respect to the innovation process and developing a better understanding of innovation and the process of taking a product to market.
  • Broker relationships with industrial enterprises for the purpose of engaging external industry based speakers for undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
  • Help identify potential research and consultancy services needed by local SMEs.
  • Provide input from an industrial practice perspective, particularly with respect to ensuring currency of practice for the review of all courses in the Design and Engineering group scheduled for academic year 2013/14.
  • Provide business guidance and support for students seeking to exploit innovative ideas, including, promoting and mentoring undergraduate and postgraduate students for the Innovation Hothouse http://theinnovationhothouse.net/.

This is fantastic news and will significantly support the Design and Engineering group to achieve Fusion between education, research and professional practice. Congratulations, Tania!

The impact of sustainable tribology

Posted in BU research, General Engineering by Iakovos

I authored a paper with colleagues from the General Engineering (Unit of Assessment 15), including Prof. M. Hadfield, Dr. B. Thomas, S. Martinez Noya, and our research sponsors Mr. I. Hensaw (Energetix Group PLC) and Mr. S. Austen (RNLI). The publication is titled “Future Perspectives on Sustainable Tribology” and was submitted to Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews Journal. It has recently been accepted (22 Feb 2012) for publication. The article is the result of a two-month support for impact (REF) exercise which took place last summer (June-July 2011) and was sponsored by the Research Development Unit (R&KEO) of Bournemouth University.

The interesting fact about the article is that the particular journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews has an impact factor of 5.367 (last five years) and is 9th out of 2009 Engineering Journals Worldwide (according to 2011 impact factor rankings) while its overall Ranking Worldwide among any Journal Indexed on Scopus is 268 out of 18854 Journals.

I would like to post this success on the Research Blog in order to show that support for impact at least in my case was worthwhile as it triggered my interest to write this “impact” paper with colleagues from Sustainable Design Research Centre (SDRC). The paper highlights the future perspectives of Sustainable Tribology by examining the economic, environmental and social impact of three tribological case studies worldwide. Each case study highlights one aspect of a number of ongoing interlinking research strands developed by the SDRC at Bournemouth University. The importance of Environmental Engineering through Sustainable Tribology solutions in our epoch is emphasized, showing that sustainability can be achieved to a significant extent through effective sustainable and environmental friendly engineering solutions, stimulating sustainable development and providing stability to our world embracing an anthropocentric and viable growth to our societies through effective sustainable solutions (figure 1).

To conclude, I would like to thank all the co-authors for their valuable help and contribution to the specific article while I would also like to express my regards to Prof. Mark Hadfield for the position he offered to me as a research assistant for REF support during that period and for his valuable guidance. I strongly believe it was a really beneficial project for myself as well as for Bournemouth University.

 

 

Using computational intelligence to develop predictive modelling that benefits organisations

Posted in BU research, Computer Science, Creative & Digital Economies by Julie Northam

Watch this excellent short video from BU’s Professor Bodgan Gabrys on the Computer Intelligence EU grant (INFER project) used to develop predictive modelling that’s applicable to multiple industries.

To see other BU videos on YouTube go to the BU YouTube page!

 

2012 Paralympics and the performance of lower limb prosthetics

Posted in BU research, General Engineering, Technology & Design by Julie Northam

Watch this excellent short video from BU’s Bryce Dyer (School of Design, Engineering and Computing) who is informing the 2012 Paralympics committee on the performance of lower limb prosthetics.

To see other BU videos on YouTube go to the BU YouTube page.

 

Bournemouth University research into prosopagnosia (face blindness)

Posted in BU research, Psychology by Julie Northam

Prosopagnosia – or ‘face blindness’ – is a little known condition affecting 1 in 50 people. As Bournemouth University psychology lecturer Dr Sarah Bate explains, it is ‘literally a loss of memory for faces’.

Speaking to BBC Inside Out’s Jon Cuthill, Dr Bate said: “Prosopagnosia sufferers know what a face is. They know the basic configuration of a face, but they absolutely fail to indentify individuals, no matter how close those people are to them.”

Dr Bate and her team at Bournemouth University have developed a brand new test to identify how good people are at face recognition. It works by processing patterns in eye movement whilst looking at a face.

The findings show that in control trials, participants scan the face in a triangular pattern, looking at the eyes, nose and mouth. In contrast, prosopagnosia sufferers compensate for their lack of recognition by looking at external features of the face, such as the ears and hair.

You can find out more about BournemouthUniversity’s research into the condition by watching Dr Bate’s recent interview on BBC Inside Out. The feature is 11 minutes in.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0160zzv/Inside_Out_South_17_10_2011/

You can test yourself for prosopagnosia at Sarah’s website: www.prosopagnosiaresearch.org.

 

Dr Sarah Bate’s research will feature on BBC One tonight!

Posted in BU research, Psychology by Julie Northam

A couple of months ago we ran a blog post about the amazing research into prosopagnosia (face blindness) being undertaken at Bournemouth University by Dr Sarah Bate (‘Find out about Dr Sarah Bate’s research into prosopagnosia‘).

Sarah will feature on tonight’s Inside Out – South show, at 7:30pm, discussing the condition with presenter Jon Cuthill and people diagnosed with prosopagnosia.

You can see a quick peek at Sarah’s research on tonight’s show here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-15290378

You can test yourself for prosopagnosia at Sarah’s website: www.prosopagnosiaresearch.org.

BU research features in the THE!

Posted in PG research by Julie Northam

Congratulations to BU PhD student Adil Saeed from DEC’s Sustainable Design Research Centre! Adil’s research featured in the Times Higher Education today – pg 15 of the printed publication as part of the Campus Round-up section.

Adil is pictured at the Tank Museum at Bovington with some additional information on the relationship between BU and the Museum and an outline of Adil’s research.

You can access the online story here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=417729&c=1

We previously ran a story on the blog about Adil’s research and the close links between BU and the Tank Museum which you can read here: Sustainable Methodology of Conserving Large Historic Vehicles in a Museum Environment.

Find out about Dr Samuel Nyman’s research into the psychosocial aspects of falls and their prevention in older people

Posted in BU research by Julie Northam

Research by Age UK estimates that falls amongst older people in the UK could be costing the NHS in excess of £4.6m a day, with up to one in three people over 65 falling each year. Falls account for over 50% of hospital admissions among the over 70s, with around 14,000 older people dying annually in the UK after a fall. Evidence suggests that if older people regularly take part in exercise specially designed to improve strength and balance then their risk of falls can be cut by up to 55%. Dr Samuel Nyman in the Psychology Research Group (DEC) undertakes research primarily focused on the psychosocial aspects of falls and their prevention in older people, and has a particular interest in helping older people become physically active to prevent falls. His work has focused on how internet-based falls prevention advice can be made more motivating and inspiring for older people, and he was invited as a guest speaker to present his research at Arthritis Research UK’s Musculoskeletal Educators Conference in June 2011.

Samuel is part of a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, led by Prof Marcus Ormerod at the University of Salford, who have been awarded funding from the MRC-led cross-council Lifelong Health and Wellbeing programme to conduct a year-long pilot study called: “Go Far (Going Outdoors: Falls, Ageing and Resilience)”. Go Far starts in January 2012 and will investigate the role of the outdoor environment in shaping health inequalities, explore older people’s experiences of falling outdoors, develop and test tools and techniques to evaluate the relationship between at-risk people and the outdoor environment, and develop a clear road map for future cross-disciplinary research in this area. The project will also involve experts from Age UK, the UK Health and Safety Laboratory, and Toronto Rehab.

Working with Dr Claire Ballinger (University of Southampton) and Prof Judith Phillips (Swansea University), Samuel’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.

Prior to this project Samuel undertook a systematic review of older people’s participation in falls prevention interventions. Earlier this year Samuel presented this research at a symposium in Italy for the European Congress of the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics, which he also co-chaired. He will also present this work as one of the six selected oral presentations at the forthcoming 12th International Conference on Falls and Postural Stability to be held in Manchester on 9 September 2011. The work has also been published as two journal articles in Age and Ageing, a leading international geriatrics journal:

Samuel is currently developing a website to use with older people later this year with the aim of identifying further (with the use of psychological theory) what are the best ways of communicating falls prevention advice to older people to facilitate their ability to continue to lead healthy, independent, and active lifestyles.

Find out about Dr Sarah Bate’s research into prosopagnosia

Posted in BU research, Psychology by Julie Northam

Prosopagnosia, or face blindness, refers to a severe deficit in recognizing familiar people from their face. The condition affects people in different ways with some experiencing difficulties in the recognition of faces and others experiencing problems recognising other things, such as objects, cars, or animals, as well as faces. Many of those people diagnosed with prosopagnosia report difficulties in other aspects of face processing, such as judging age or gender, and the majority report navigational difficulties. Dr Sarah Bate is a neuropsychologist working in BU’s Psychology Research Group and has been researching the condition for a number of years.

The condition might be more common than previously thought with one study suggesting that as many as 2.5% of the population might have developmental prosopagnosia.

Working with Dr Brad Duchaine (Dartmouth College), Sarah is developing and testing some intervention programmes that might improve face processing in prosopagnosia. Sarah has set up a website (www.prosopagnosiaresearch.org) to raise awareness of prosopagnia and to recruit candidates for her research. Sarah has devised an online test of face recognition ability which can be taken via the website. I took the test last night and highly recommend that others have a go. To date almost 4,000 people worldwide have taken the test. At the end of the test you will be given the option to register your details to visit Sarah at BU for a more formal assessment. During formal assessments Sarah makes use of BU’s eye-tracking technology to assess how prosopagnosics visually read faces.

Sarah is also interested in whether face blindness is hereditary and physiological rather than psychological. She is colaborating with genetics researchers to test families of prosopagnosics and examine any links. The research is ongoing, but initial findings suggest prosopagnia is hereditry, but not always. Sarah’s research aims to identify the sub-types and various causes of prosopagnia, and to improve public understanding of the condition, as well as increasing the early diagnosis of the condition in children.

The Psychology Research Group are always looking for volunteers to take part in their research (example projects include navigation and ageing, children’s language and literature development, and poor sleep in school children). To find out more, visit the psychology volunteers section on the Group’s website.

Sarah’s research has recently been featured in the Guardian. You can read the full story here: Researchers explore problems of ‘face blindness’

You can test yourself for prosopagnosia at Sarah’s website: www.prosopagnosiaresearch.org

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