Funded PhD studentships in the School of Psychology

Full time and Part time studentships now available - closing date 11 June 2018

There is one fully funded three year studentship and one part-time five-year PhD/Teaching and Research Associate post available at the moment in the school. Self-financed candidates can apply at any time.

The school has a wide range of psychology research interests including cognition, learning, vision, music, developmental, emotion, health, clinical, social and neuroscience. Students have access to an extensive, modern and well-equipped laboratory facilities supported by a dedicated team of technical staff.

Successful applicants will be part of a large, vibrant, highly collaborative community of PhD students with good interdisciplinary links. Currently the school has around 50 students registered for a PhD, and over 30 students studying for a DClinPsy. Psychology PhD students automatically become members of both the Plymouth University Doctoral Training Centre in Social Sciences, which provides interdisciplinary training and networking opportunities for around 160 doctoral students, and the interdisciplinary Cognition Institute providing further opportunities for research, training and collaboration. The School is also part of the ESRC South West Doctoral Training Partnership.

How to apply

Candidates should submit a 1000-word research proposal with their application. Candidates are strongly encouraged to discuss their proposal/plans with their intended supervisor. 

Applicants for the part time PhD/TARA post must ALSO apply for the TARA post through the University job vacancies page. An advert for this post and details on the application process can be found on the jobs.ac.uk website.

A range of potential projects and supervisors can be found below, and further details about research in the school and our academic staff are available from our web pages.

For details on how to apply, please see these Doctoral College pages. 

Enquiries about PhD studies may be sent to Chris Mitchell, PhD tutor at christopher.mitchell@plymouth.ac.uk. 

The School of Psychology at Plymouth University is a member of the ESRC South West Doctoral Training Partnership.            

Potential  PhD topics in Cognition and Social Cognition

One step ahead: how predictions shape social perception Patric Bach

Humans are masters in predicting others’ behaviour. By watching a child’s facial expression, we know exactly which toy she will go for. When seeing someone frown at an open window, we are not surprised when she gets up and closes it. Conversely, a breakdown of these predictions might be one reason why social interactions are so confusing to those with autism. This project investigates the neurocognitive mechanisms that allow humans to make such predictions, on what kind of information they rely on, and how they interact with subsequent processes to drive perception and action. It will rely on sophisticated methods from psychophysics and experimental psychology, as well as neuroscientific methods such as EEG/ERPs and TMS. For motivated students, there is the option to work with individuals on the autism spectrum. The work will run in association with an ESRC research project led by Patric Bach. The student will be part of Patric Bach’s Action Prediction Lab.

Testing Models of Explicit and Implicit Memory Dr Chris Berry

Computational models are powerful tools for understanding human cognition, and their use has led to new, often counterintuitive, theoretical insights. Projects are available that combine computational modelling with behavioural experimentation to investigate the relation between explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious) memory. Although the traditional view of explicit and implicit memory is that they are driven by distinct memory systems in the brain, numerous lines of research have converged on the view that memory systems may not divide so sharply on consciousness. Indeed, computational modelling approaches have shown that an alternative, single-system model explains numerous key findings thought to be indicative of distinct systems; it also makes predictions that can be verified empirically. This type of project would suit someone who has experience or interest in programming and has strong statistical/research methods skills. Applicants are advised to make contact to discuss the specific direction of the project before applying.

Habits and Actions Prof Chris Mitchell

Habits are responses to the environment that are not under the individual’s control. Usually habits are useful. For example, an experienced car driver can change gear habitually without using the cognitive capacity that is necessary to monitor the traffic conditions. However, sometimes habits lead to costly errors, such as calling a new partner by an ex-partner’s name. The standard explanation for the development of habits is that we form stimulus-response (S-R) links as a consequence of lots of practice. These S-R links are thought to be the product of a primitive, evolutionarily old part of the brain that functions separately from more high-level processes responsible for reasoning and decision making. This project will focus on the way in which our environment leads us to behave habitually, perhaps as a consequence of a low level S-R mechanism.

 Mind wandering, Imagination and Emotion 
 Clare Walsh


When people engage in everyday tasks, they frequently allow their minds to wander to unrelated thoughts. During mind wandering people often think about the past or the future and they often imagine how things could have happened differently or they imagine what might happen in the future. This project will examine the processes involved in different kinds of mind wandering. By varying the tasks that people engage in, we will examine the impact on the amount and content of people's mind wandering thoughts. The project will also examine the impact of these thoughts on people's judgments and emotions. 

Navigation in real and virtual worlds Peter Jones & Alastair Smith

For effective navigation, it is essential that we are able to keep track of our location and orientation in space. How exactly humans and other animals do this is hotly debated, and this project will aim to shed more light on this process. We will examine how people navigate in real and virtual environments in order to determine how we use different kinds of information to find our way. For instance, people might use distinctive landmarks and boundaries as a guide to position. We might also use visual and self-motion cues to maintain a record of our movements, so that we know where we are in relation to where we have come from. This project will examine how we learn to find our way around, how different kinds of information interact with one another, and whether our movements are guided by internal maps of the external world.

Category Learning  Professor Andy Wills

Categories are the fundamental building blocks of thought, but how do we acquire new categories? A currently popular view is that our brain contains two or more competing (or cooperating) processes; for example explicit rules and implicit similarity, or prototypes and exemplars. Yet, the evidence securely in support of such multi-process views is limited, particularly in light of recent re-evaluations of some of the key empirical results. Another problem is that the relative adequacy of the various formal (mathematical) theories of category learning has not been systematically investigated. The aim of this project is to advance both the empirical and the theoretical work in this area.

 Source errors in recall.  Professor Tim Hollins

Memory errors often involve confusions about the source of an event – people report reading what they saw on TV, witnessing what they heard in conversation, or confusing yesterday’s dinner with what they ate the day before.  Why do such confusions occur?  Two steps are involved. First the wrong memory has to come to mind (selection), and then it has to be wrongly accepted (monitoring).  To date, the study of such errors has been dominated by source-monitoring paradigms using recognition memory tests, but these neglect the role of selection (because the experimenter provides the item). Consequently, this PhD will attempt to develop recall-based paradigms to test the joint role of selection and monitoring in recall.

The cognitive representation of non-speech audio  Judy Edworthy, Sue Denham 

Understanding how we process non-speech auditory information has important implications for how we learn, remember, and represent auditory sequences. Two examples of short auditory sequences which have important real-world functions are the hooks of popular songs and the auditory alarms and warnings which surround us. In this project we will investigate the contributions of acoustic and other factors (for example, semantic factors) which contribute to the ease with which short audio sequences are learned, remembered, imagined, are capable of conveying metaphor and meaning,  and are involuntary (in the case of 'earworms'). The methodologies used may include cognitive psychology experiments along with other techniques (which may include physiological measurements) and approaches. The project will further develop our theoretical knowledge of auditory cognition whilst contributing to the relevant applied areas of popular music construction and the design of audible alarms.                                                               

Singing out of tune: the Rod Stewart phenomenon Judy Edworthy, Sue Denham 

How do we react to out-of-tune singing? Anecdotally there are several very successful singers who habitually sing sharp, and yet we find this acceptable, indeed enjoyable. As a psychological phenomenon the issue of mismatch between auditory figure and ground taps into several fundamental issues of auditory perception including psychophysics (how out-od-tune does the melody have to be before we notice it), categorical perception (when a melody is so out-of-tune relative to its background it is now in a new and different key) and aesthetics (how can we sometimes like an out-of-tune melody, and how does this interact with categorical perception). This project will investigate these issues in a series of experiments using traditional laboratory techniques, and in later stages may take a neuroscience and/or applied perspective, working with local music studios.

 Using virtual worlds to understanding human foraging behaviour Alastair Smith

Foraging is a fundamental behaviour for many species. In humans, it has even been typified as the context of our cognitive evolution, and many societies today still subsist on hunting and gathering. However, foraging behaviour is present in all societies, from searching a supermarket shelf to scouring your home for a lost set of keys. This activity is supported by a variety of psychological functions that include, perception, attention, memory, and decision making. Traditionally, psychologists have studied human search behaviour using the visual search paradigm, although this tends to constrain our understanding to simple two-dimensional spaces presented on a monitor. Advances in virtual reality technology present an exciting opportunity to create controlled three-dimensional search spaces that participants can freely move around. This project will make use of Plymouth’s world class VR suites to explore the psychological factors that support efficient foraging behaviour. This can include explorations of environmental structure (e.g. shape, landmarks), statistical properties of the array (e.g. fruiting patterns, spatial likelihoods), and the individual differences that underlie search (e.g. working memory, autistic traits). There may also be the opportunity to address some of these issues in patients who have sustained neurological damage, and to look at changes in search behaviour associated with typical ageing. 

Multi-modal approaches to social and moral judgements  Sylvia Terbeck

In this project of experimental social psychology, you will have the opportunity to study social and moral decision making using a multi-array of methods and theories. You can study moral judgements (based in philosophy; decisions about what one ought to do) as well as social judgements (intergroup relations, prejudice), using experimental psychology, psychopharmacology, and computer science methods. You will have the opportunity to use 3D immersive virtual reality to study realistic virtual human behaviour. Furthermore, the neuroscience of such processes can be studied using pharmaceutical interventions (such as amino-acid depletion paradigms, or the use of OTC medicines).  Results can impact on the fields of philosophy, social neuroscience, social sciences and law. Co-supervised by Dr Ian Howard (Computer Science and Robotics).

 Memory: Is forgetting an adaptive mechanism? Michael Verde

Theories of memory have traditionally viewed forgetting as a negative consequence of limitations of the memory system. Anderson’s (2003) retrieval inhibition theory proposes that, on the contrary, forgetting is adaptive and the ability to suppress certain memories is beneficial to the normal function of the memory system. This research will use a range of empirical paradigms and quantitative modelling techniques to investigate the factors that contribute to forgetting, including interference from other memories, conscious inhibition, and context change. Although the focus is on basic research, there is scope for investigating the implications of inhibition and forgetting in applied areas. For example, are emotional or traumatic memories more difficult or easy to suppress? Does suppressing irrelevant information facilitate problem-solving? In revising educational materials, does the strategic inhibition of knowledge actually improve long-term learning?

Effective Learning through Testing: The Testing Effect in Basic and Applied Research Michael Verde

A great deal of recent interest has focused on the role of testing in learning. Both basic and applied research suggests that revising information through active retrieval is one of the most effective ways to promote long term retention (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006; Roediger & Pyc, 2012). This research project has two goals. The first is to investigate the factors that make testing such an effective method of revision. We will consider theories of associative strengthening, information integration, and contextual reinstatement. The second goal is to apply our findings to ecologically valid materials and settings such as science education. This project has strong potential for interdisciplinary work with researchers in education and biology.  

Passing the Neuroscience of Tool use to Robots Dr Jeremy Goslin

In embodied models of cognition our representations of objects are formed around the motor programs used to manipulate them. This means that not only do we automatically prepare relevant actions when viewing objects, but also that our actions modulate our perception of our environment and those interacting within it. Robots with a similar embodied architecture should also benefit from a more seamless sensory-motor integration. In this project electrophysiological brain imaging techniques will be used in virtual reality environments to examine how object-based affordances help us to learn and manipulate tools. This new understanding will then be used to directly inform interactive models of human-robot object manipulation and collaboration.

Potential PhD topics in Human Neuroscience

Decoding the contents of memory and imagination in the human brain Haline Schendan

A long-standing goal of neuroscience is to read the contents of the mind. Brain imaging has advanced toward this goal, but few studies directly measured human brain activity in real time, as can be done best using electroencephalography (EEG). This project capitalises on a new method (Schendan and Ganis, 2008; 2012) to determine the contents and mechanisms of memory and mental imagery (i.e., imagining objects, people and places). Some experiments focus on semantic memory, meaning, and embodied cognition. Others focus on episodic simulation, which is mental imagery based on recollection of personally experienced events and a core function of episodic memory that is critical for future thinking. Additional methods available include functional magnetic resonance imaging, brain stimulation, neurocomputational modelling, eye tracking, and various data analysis techniques (e.g., signal processing). Findings will reveal what people are remembering and thinking and provide crucial information to advance theories of mental imagery and memory.

Brain mechanisms for perceptual constancy, generalization and specificity (or inflexibility) of human decision-making and memory Haline Schendan

People readily attribute meaning to what they see, even for highly novel objects, such as abstract art, inventions, impossible objects (e.g., Escher figures), and highly visually impoverished objects (e.g., when obscured through fog) (Voss, et al., 2010; Schendan, et al., 2009). Bottom-up processing along the ventral visual stream supports cognition with highly familiar, canonical, and prototypical objects, but fails with novel, unfamiliar or highly impoverished objects. Perceptual hypothesis testing theories, such as the multiple-state interactive account (Schendan & Ganis, 2015), propose that top-down processes from higher order processing areas (e.g., frontoparietal cortex) modulate lower order processing (e.g., occipitoemporal cortex), but detailed neural mechanisms are largely unknown. This project uses human brain imaging, especially electroencephalography, to determine these mechanisms. Findings will explain how people make decisions and remember even when current experience differs widely from the past and reveals limits of generalization by examining perceptually-specific neural responses.

The role of response inhibition and response conflict in deception Giorgio Ganis, Patric Bach

"Deception is defined as an attempt to convince someone else of something the prevaricator believes to be untrue. Much research on deception has focused on the idea that telling a lie results both in response conflict and in the inhibition of the corresponding truthful response. Initial electrophysiological findings were consistent with this idea, but they did not distinguish between response conflict and inhibition. More importantly, they were contaminated by serious experimental confounds. This project will use cognitive neuroscience methods (brain sensing and brain stimulation) and theories to investigate the timecourse of response conflict and inhibition during deceptive interactions. Furthermore, it will develop ecologically valid paradigms and novel analysis techniques to enable the use of this information to optimize deception detection methods."

Early stages of vision  William Simpson

The most fundamental process in vision is one of detection: Is something there or not? Studies of visual detection have revealed much about the early stages of vision. An important tool in understanding detection is noise--random variations in the image. Noise allows us to compare a real observer to an ideal one. An ideal observer will form a template of the pattern to be detected, and will compare the image on the screen to that. The recently developed method of Classification Images allows us to see this template used by real observers. Machine Learning techniques can also be used to do this. Mammography is a real world domain where the radiologist attempts to detect a signal (lesion) in noisy images. Classification Images can help show how these expert observers perform a detection task. Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy is a relatively new way to measure brain activity, and this can also be used as a tool in studying visual detection processes. The supervisor of this project has radiologist collaborators at Derriford Hospital.

Indecision-making   Chris Harris

In cognitive psychology, our understanding of human decision-making is based mostly on two-alternative forced choice experiments (2AFC), where a participant must choose between two mutually exclusive alternatives. The ‘rational’ decision is to choose the alternative with the higher value or (subjective) utility. There is accumulating evidence that this is a very narrow and artificial interpretation of decision-making. This PhD project is to explore a completely different approach to decision-making, and even to question whether decisions are really made at all. It is well-known that there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy of responses, and we have shown that there is an optimal time to respond with higher valued choices being responded to more quickly. Thus, 2AFC experiments map onto the time-domain in an ordered sequence. Our previous and current experiments clearly show that participants respond in a way that maximises their rate of reward. A logical consequence of this mapping is that more than one choice can be pursued simultaneously (i.e. in parallel). The fundamental question to be addressed is how do we cope with this much richer space of alternatives and is the concept of ‘rationality’ obsolete.