Institute of Psychological Sciences

The Leeds Cognition Group

The Leeds Cognition Group comprises nineteen research active staff members who supervise a thriving community of post-doctoral researchers and postgraduate students. The LCG enjoy outstanding facilities and an excellent level of support from the University. The LCG offers a truly exciting environment for cognitive research with an exceptional blend of early career and established senior scientists.

The LCG is organized into six sub-groups for internal administration but the group work together as a coherent team to enable science without frontiers targeted at specific research topics. Our aim is to be recognized as world leaders in the area of Cognitive Psychology (as indexed by specific research metrics).

Special interests

Cognitive Neuroscience

Control

Language

This research group explores a range of applied and theoretical issues. The scientific goals of the group centre on relationships between language and memory, including age of acquisition and language function in memory disorders. The research has been funded by ESRC, etc.

Research includes study of the processes involved in word recognition and production, with a focus on the time-course of normal adult single-word processing speed. Catriona Morrison's work has looked at factors influencing processing speed, and it seems that the age at which words are learnt has the most important influence on their recognition speed. This age of acquisition (AoA) effect is now very well documented, although the precise role of AoA and the mechanisms by which it operates are not yet clearly understood.

Long Term Memory

This research sub-group explores a range of applied and theoretical issues. The scientific goals of the group centre on relationships between: consciousness and memory (e.g. subjective experience, states of awareness); self and memory (e.g. autobiographical memory, memory disorder and identity); emotion and cognition (including neuroscience and emotion, working memory and emotion and inhibitory function); and language and memory (including age of acquisition, and language function in memory disorders). The research has been funded by ESRC, etc.

Perception & Performance Action

This research grouping led by Dr McKeown is world-leading in attentional mechanisms of visual control of action, driver behaviour, auditory memory, and motor control. The group has published leading research into vehicle recognition by acoustic signature (McKeown), visual control of human motor behaviour (Mon-Williams, Wilkie), eye-movement analysis in understanding human motor control (Burke), visual attention (Delvenne), human-computer interaction (Gardner), and auditory timbre and memory (McKeown, Mercer). The group publishes widely in the psychological and neuropsychological literature (Journal of Experimental Psychology, Experimental Brain Research, Human Factors, Cerebral Cortex, Journal of Motor Behavior, Psychophysiology) and is funded from a variety of sources including ESRC and The Royal Society.

The Psychology of Design