Alison Bacon

Research interests
My principle research interests concern individual differences and the implications of these in everyday life. Thinking & reasoning strategies, mental representations, visual-spatial memory, imagery & creativity. Dyslexia. Personality. Psychology of art. Experience of Higher Education, particulalry in non-traditional students.  

UoP Research group membership

Centre for Research in Brain, Cognition and Behaviour (CBCB) 
Cognition 

Grants & contracts
ESRC. £99, 798. April 2008 - August 2009. Award no. RES000222815. Bacon A.M. & Parmentier, F.B.R.  How do people with dyslexia remember visuo-spatial information?

ESRC. £99,910. Oct 2006 - March 2008. Award no. RES000221965. Bacon, A.M. & Handley, S.J. Dyslexia and the impact of strategy preference on reasoning.

ESRC, £46,000. September 2005 to August 2006. Award no. RES000221293. Evans, J., Bacon, A. &. Handley, S. An investigation of dual processes in conditional reasoning.

ESRC funded PhD studentship, October 2000-September 2003. Award no. R42200034033.Bacon, A.M. Individual Differences and Strategies for Human Reasoning.  

Publications

Bacon, A.M. & Handley, S.J. (2010). Dyslexia & reasoning: the importance of visual processes. British Journal of Psychology, 101, 433-452.

Bacon, A.M. & Handley, S.J. (2010). Dyslexia, reasoning and the importance of visual-spatial processes. In N. Alexander-Passe (Ed.). Dyslexia and Creativity: Investigations from Differing Perspectives (pp. 25-49). New York: Nova..

Evans, J. St. B.T., Handley, S.J. & Bacon, A.M. (2009). Reasoning under time pressure: A study of causal conditional inference. Experimental Psychology, 56(2), 77-83.

Bacon, A.M., Handley, S.J., Dennis I. & Newstead, S.E. (2008). Reasoning strategies: the role of working memory and verbal-spatial ability. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 20(6), 1065 - 1086.

Elqayam, S., Handley, S.J., Evans, J.St.B.T., and Bacon, A.M. (2008). On some limits of hypothetical thinking. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.61(5), 784-808.

Bacon, A.M., Handley, S.J. and McDonald, E.L. (2007). Reasoning and dyslexia: a spatial strategy may impede reasoning with visually rich information. British Journal of Psychology, 98(1), 79-92.

Bacon, A.M., Handley, S.J. and Newstead, S.E. (2003). Individual differences in strategies for syllogistic reasoning. Thinking & Reasoning, 9(2), 133-168.

Bacon, A.M., Handley, S.J. and Newstead, S.E. (2005). Verbal and spatial strategies in reasoning. In Roberts, M. and Newton, E. (Eds.). Methods of Thought: Individual Differences in Reasoning Strategies (pp. 81-105). Hove: Psychology Press. 

Coventry, K. R., Cangelosi, A., Rajapakse, R., Bacon, A., Newstead, S., Joyce, D. & Richards, L. V. (2005). Spatial prepositions and vague quantifiers: Implementing the functional geometric framework. In C. Freksa, B. Knauff & B. Krieg-Bruckner & B. Nebel (Eds.), Spatial Cognition, Volume IV. Reasoning, Action and Interaction, pp 98-110. Lecture notes in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag.

Rajapakse R.K., Cangelosi A., Coventry K.R, Newstead S., Bacon A. (2005), Connectionist modeling of linguistic quantifiers. In W. Duch, J. Kacprzyk, E. Oja & S. Zadrozny (Eds.) Artificial Neural Networks: Formal Models and Their Applications - ICANN 2005. 15th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (Part II) (LNCS 3697).Berlin Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 679-684.

Rajapakse R.K., Cangelosi A., Coventry K., Newstead S. and Bacon A. (2005). Grounding linguistic quantifiers in perception: Experiments on numerosity judgments. 2nd Language & Technology Conference: Human Language Technologies as a Challenge for Computer Science and Linguistics. April 21-23, 2005, Poznañ, Poland

Cangelosi A., K. Coventry, R. Rajapakse, D. Joyce, Bacon, A., L. Richards, S. Newstead (2005), Grounding language in perception: A connectionist model of spatial terms and vague quantifiers. In A. Cangelosi, G. Bugmann & R. Borisyuk (Eds.), Modelling Language, Cognition and Action: Proceedings of the 9th Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop. Singapore: World Scientific. pp. 47-56

Conference Presentations

Bacon, A.M. & Parmentier, F. (2009). Dyslexia and Visual-Spatial Memory. BPS Cognitive Psychology Section Annual Conference: 1-3 September 2009.

Bacon, A.M. & Handley, S.J. (2008). Dyslexia & Reasoning: the Role of Visual Memory. Sixth International Conference on Thinking: Venice, 21-23 August 2008

Bacon, A.M. & Handley, S.J. (2007). Dyslexia and the role of visual imagery in reasoning. BPS Cognitive Psychology Section XXIV Annual Conference, Aberdeen, 20-22 August 2007.

Bacon, A.M., Handley, S.J. and Newstead, S.E. (2004). Verbal and Spatial Strategies for Reasoning. Fifth International Conference on Thinking, Leuven, 22-24 July 2004.

Bacon, A.M., Handley, S.J. and Newstead, S.E. (2002). Individual differences in strategies for human reasoning. BPS Cognitive Psychology Section XVII Annual Conference, Kent, 9-11 September 2002.

Bacon, A.M. (2000). Individual differences in formal and informal human reasoning. British Psychological Society Annual Conference, Winchester, 9-11 April 2000.

Coventry K.R., Cangelosi A., Newstead S., Bacon A., Rajapakse R. (2005), Grounding natural language quantifiers in visual attention. XXVII Annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Stresa.