South East ESRC Doctoral Training Centre (DTC): PhD Opportunities

The Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London invites applications for PhD studentships for the academic year 2011-12.

The Department of Psychology is proud to be part of the South East ESRC Doctoral Training Centre in collaboration with the Universities of Reading, Surrey, and Kent. This centre of excellence for postgraduate research training has 24 studentships across the consortium for entry in the 2011/2012 academic year. The South-EastESRCDTC partners make major contributions to social science research regionally, nationally and internationally andthiscollaborationplacesoursocial scientistsat the centre of inter-institutional research and training activities.Thispartnership willenhance the doctoral experience of our social science postgraduate researcherswho will benefitfromtraining, developmentand networkingopportunities offered across theDTCincluding access to advanced training offered by the consortium partners. Further information is available from

The Department of Psychology was ranked 7th in the UK in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and was ranked 4th overall in the Guardian league tables. The department has over thirty members of academic staff and some 25 post-graduate research (PhD) students. We offer a vibrant research community and excellent facilities including a research designated functional imaging unit.

Eligibility:

Home and EU candidates are eligible to make applications for ESRC studentship funding; please see guidance on residency requirements outlined in the ESRC's Postgraduate Funding Guide[31]. The ESRC has advised DTCs that they will be able to recruit International students for studentship awards in Economics or Advanced Quantitative Methods without adhering to the current residential eligibility rules laid out in the ESRC Postgraduate Training Guide.

We encourage applications from students with good undergraduate degrees in Psychology, or related disciplines to apply in all areas of psychology. Students may be required to complete a Masters degree before embarking on PhD training. The Department of Psychology will select the best applications to compete for ESRC studentships within the DTC. Contact potential supervisors via e-mail before submitting a full application, attaching a CV and your projected degree class. Further details regarding supervisors’ research interests, and details of the application process, are described on ourweb site: (

How to apply:

  • After agreeing a protocol with prospective supervisors, applicants must complete the college application form. Application forms are available on request from the Admissions Office (email: ). It is recommended that applicants use the on-line application service Embark.
  • Submit a research proposal. Research proposals should be discussed and approved by the supervisor.
  • Supply two academic references. These should be as specific and as detailed as possible so candidates should ask their referees to provide as much information about their academic achievements at either BA or MA level (whichever is relevant) which includes details of their relative position within their cohort and details of their performance on individual courses/modules.
  • In order to be considered for the ESRC DTC studentship competition, you must meet the entry requirements for the postgraduate research degree programme for which you are applying. Only candidates with the minimum of a 2.1 at undergraduate level will be considered eligible for consideration in the ESRC DTC studentship competition.
  • You must have submitted all supporting documentation with your completed application form and have provided the details of two academic referees by the deadline of Friday 11 March 2011.
  • If selected for entry into the ESRC DTC studentship award, you will be required to work with your supervisor and academic school to complete an ESRC DTC application form. You would need to be easily contactable in the period up to 15 April 2011 in order to ensure that the application form can be successfully finalised and submitted.

We are interested in projects in a wide range of areas, such as:

(contact for inquiries in brackets):

Errors of perception and attention in elderly drivers()

Including advanced quantitative methods in the form of psychophysical methods embedded in realistic 3D simulations (“Virtual Reality”) and the potential for either integrating eye-movement recording or some investigations using fMRI.

Paranoia and psychopathy: A game theoretic investigation ()

The proposed project would combine insights from cognitive neuropsychiatry with

paradigms from behavioural economics and the psychological study of moral reasoning

to investigate how the social inferences and social preferences of individuals with social

cognitive deficits affect their behaviour in strategic situations.

Reading and visual word recognition()

Seeking candidates who will use methods from experimental psychology and/or computational modeling to better understand how readers recognize words and how this ability is acquired. Students with skills in computer programming and/or mathematics are especially encouraged to apply.

Individual differences in memory capacity in typically developing children and adults()

We use memory for most everyday activities, and yet the capacity of memory differs greatly from person to person; some people can hold a lot of information in mind at once, whilst others have a relatively small memory capacity. These individual differences in capacity are important, particularly in childhood: over 80% of children with low working-memory capacity (those in the bottom 10th percentile for their age group) have substantial problems with eitherreading or mathematics, or usually both (Gathercole and Alloway, 2008).

Candidates interested in a PhD in this area could consider some of the following questions: Why do some people have a greater memory capacity than others? What are the consequences of differences in memory capacity for later life? What factors might constrain our apparent memory capacity? What are the neural mechanisms that distinguish those with high and low working memory capacity?

Learning speech and learning action: Behavioural and neuroimaging approaches()

Learning to speak can be regarded as a special case of motor learning, which has typically been investigated by studying how manual actions become skilled. There are some interesting similarities and differences between speech and manual action that are not well understood. This project will compare their mechanisms using a range of cutting-edge behavioural methods and functional neuroimaging methods.

Learning to read: typical and atypical development ()

Much is known about how children learn to read, but we know very little about what turns an early reader into a skilled reader. This project will address this gap in our knowledge by studying the reading performance of typically-developing children aged 10, 12, and 14. We will also be examining the profile of reading skills in a group of children with known language impairments.

The interplay of values and identities: How do they affect one another?

()

This would be a quantitative project integrating values and identities and exploring how

they affect one another, using some experiments and possibly longitudinal designs.

Factors that influence information giving, comprehension and decision making in healthcare()

Patients with complex disability, in both the cognitive and physical domains, are disadvantaged when accessing and comprehending healthcare information. This reduces their ability to make good decisions about their health and manage their illness optimally. This project will investigate how accessing and comprehending healthcare information can be supported, in terms of media, print and other physical characteristics of information, presentation of spoken information, and interaction content and structure.

Strategies for reading in the visually impaired()

This project will investigate strategies to improve reading in individuals with a loss of

central vision such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD). This project will

examine the use of ‘eccentric viewing’ techniques combined with methods of text

presentation (such as scrolling and RSVP) to improve reading performance. The findings

will inform the development of reading aids for AMD.
Research in memory related to eyewitness testimony, jury decision makingand detection of deception()

Specifically the role ofVerbal and Non-Verbal cues in the assessment ofcredibility of witnesses in the courtroom.

The deadline for applicants wishing to be entered into this competition is 11st March 2011.

Remaining queries can be directed to:

Dr Tamar Pincus () (Director of Graduate Studies)

and Carol Blackman () (Postgraduate secretary).

Closing date: 11. March 2011