The visual cognition group at The University of Salford is part of a wider group of visual cognition researchers in the North West, known as the North-West Visual Cognition Group (NWVC)

From July 2022 until July 2023 the NWVC are hosting 4 research seminars across universities in the North West of England funded by the BPS. This week it’s Salfords turn!

On Friday 24th March we will host the third seminar at our Media City campus. The seminar will focus on how knowledge and expertise influence the way in which we represent the world. Topics include exploration of cognition and eye movements during spectatorship of the environment, improving perception and visuomotor control in elite sport, attention and eye movements in social interactions, and visual search during navigation. More details and full schedule on the NWVC site.

Dr Robert Bendall has recently received funding for an exciting project through The Ideas Fund. Rob will be working with Oldham-based organisation Men Behaving Dadly to co-create a research project aimed at maximising the positive impact of play. Additional project partners are Oldham Play Action Group and Greenacres Community Centre. Read more here.

A key ethos of the research activity in the Visual Cognition Research group is the practice of open science. As part of this, a long with Salford’s local UK Reproducibility Network Lead, Dr Sharon Coen, the Co-Chairs of the Visual Cognition Research Group, Dr Samantha Gregory and Dr Robert Bendall, are also co-chairs of the University of Salford Psychology Open Science working group.

We promote open and reproducible research practice by working to create a community where open research practice is the norm. We offer workshops on open science practice as well as keeping this practice at the front of research discussion. We also practice what we preach by using the OSF to pre-register research studies, upload pre-prints of submitted work, and upload open data and resources related to our research.

As part of our activities, we are collaborating with other networks in the North of England, including being part of a joint ReproducibiliTea. ReproducabiliTea is a journal club where we discuss papers and ideas related to the Open Science movement. We are launching this initiative on December 15th with mince pies and festive cheer.

If you want to get involved, please contact us on local-salford@ukrn.org

For more information on UKRN, please visit https://www.ukrn.org/

David Beevers (PhD Student) Chairs session at the School of Science, Engineering, and Environment IPGRC Conference

On 6th April 2022 David attended the International Postgraduate Research Conference hosted by the School of Science, Engineering, and Environment. The theme of the conference was ‘Resilience in Research and Practice’ and David submitted a proposal towards the end of 2021 to Chair a session titled “Exploring the psychological impact of design”. The four speakers approached the topic from very different angles and David did a great job coordinating and Chairing the session (particularly as this was a hybrid event and whilst the speakers were all online, David and most of the audience attended in-person!). David has since written about the session on the Perception + Space webpage.

PhD Student, David Beevers, publishes in the BPS Cognitive Bulletin

We are very excited to announce that David has published an overview of the work he completed on an EPS New Graduate Research Bursary in the Spring 2022 issue of the Cognitive Bulletin. David worked on the project with Dr Catherine Thompson during the summer of 2021 before starting his PhD. Details of the Cognitive Bulletin can be found here.

ESRC Festival of Social Science November 2021 – Cognitive Restoration: The effects of the environment on thinking

The Visual Cognition group presented some of their research projects and expertise in an online research showcase in July 2021. This was a great way to communicate our work to those outside of Psychology and it was really nice to see colleagues from other disciplines interested in our research.

Entry to the APA PsycShorts 2019 competition

In March 2019 the Visual Cognition group was very excited to put together a video that briefly explains visuomotor priming for entry into the APA PsycShorts competition. Sadly, our video did not win one of the 12 prizes, but it was a great (and new!) experience. We also faced some tough competition with around 200 entries to the competition. You can see each of the winning videos here.    

Industry 4.0 

Group members Dr Adam Galpin, Dr Maria Panagiotidi, and Dr Catherine Thompson presented the work of the Visual Cognition research group at the Industry 4.0 event, part of the annual Festival of Research. The audience was very different to that of the workshop in which we demonstrated the equipment, and it is great to share research with a wide range of individuals. 

Want to know what I’m thinking? Look into my eyes 

As part of the
University of Salford’s Festival of Research in the summer of 2019 the Visual Cognition group invited students and colleagues from across the University to our labs to demonstrate some of the unique and interesting equipment that we use within psychology. If you were not able to attend the workshop you can find a short video that captured the event here.