Recent and current research projects from the group:

A Distinctly Dads Exploration Of The Value Of Play

Dr Robert Bendall is 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.

Fire Service Research and Training Trust (FSRTT) Grant

In January 2022 Dr Catherine Thompson began work on a 12-month research project funded by the FSRTT. The research (titled: In the heat of the moment: Investigating the impact of thermal stress on the cognitive functioning of fire fighters) explores the influence of extreme temperatures on basic cognitive processing and decision making in fire fighters. Catherine is joined on the project by two colleagues from Sports Rehabilitation, Martyn Matthews and Dr Steve Pearson, and we have recently welcomed two new members of staff, a Research Assistant (Lucy Ferrie) and a Project Officer (Brian Highlands). More details about the project can be found on our blog.

BPS Psychobiology Networking Award

This award was funded to members of our group in February 2020. Together Dr Robert Bendall, Dr Simon Cassidy, Dr Adam Galpin, and Dr Catherine Thompson have hosted a series of networking events to promote the work of the Visual Cognition research group. We have also been
supported by undergraduate students David Beevers and Eileen Quigley who have presented the work of the group to their fellow students. David has also been instrumental in the establishment of the Visual Cognition website and has written (and continues to write) many of our features items.

For information about this project and ongoing events associated with the award please contact Dr Robert Bendall – r.c.a.bendall@salford.ac.uk.

Salford Community for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (SCELT) Scholarship

This project is led by Dr Adam Galpin but involves many members (and past members) of our team (David Beevers, Dr Robert Bendall, Dr Simon Cassidy, Dr Maria Panagiotidi, Eileen Quigley, Dr Ben Short, and Dr Catherine Thompson). The SCELT is a University of Salford initiative that provides funding to a variety of projects to enhance teaching and learning. The aim of our project was to re-design the Cognitive Psychology modules on our undergraduate degree
programmes by working with our students and gaining their thoughts and insights via a series of co-creation workshops. We have identified key factors that students value with regard to their learning in general, and to cognitive psychology specifically and are using these to inform our curriculum design.

Contact Dr Adam Galpin for more details – a.j.galpin@salford.ac.uk.

Some recent publications from our team:

Wang, Karlinsky, Constable, Gregory, & Welsh (in press). Social gaze cueing elicits facilitatory and inhibitory effects on movement execution when the model might act on an object, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Gregory, S. E. A. & Kessler, K. (2022). Investigating age differences in the influence of joint attention on working memory, Psychology and Aging. https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000694

Cassidy, S., Mawdsley, A., Langran, L., & Willis, S. C. (2022). A large-scale multi centre study of academic resilience and wellbeing in pharmacy education. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 8998. https://doi.org/10.5688/ajpe8998

Galpin, A., Beevers, D., Cassidy, S., Short, B., Panagiotidi, M., Bendall, R. C., Quigley, E., & Thompson, C. (2022). Values-led curriculum co-creation: A curriculum re-innovation case study. The Curriculum Journal, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.154

Grant, A., & Cassidy, S. (2022). Exploring the relationship between psychological flexibility and self-report and task-based measures of cognitive flexibility. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 23, 144-150. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcbs.2021.12.006

Beevers, D. (2022). Discovering the fascination behind cognitive restoration. The BPS Cognitive Psychology Bulletin, 7, 49-52.

Gregory, S. E. A., Wang, H., & Kessler, K. (2022). A dataset of EEG recordings from 47 participants collected during a virtual reality working memory task where attention was cued by a social avatar and non-social stick cue. Data in Brief, 41, 107827. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2022.107827

Bendall, R. C. A., Eachus, P., & Thompson, C. (2022). The influence of stimuli valence, extraversion, and emotion regulation on visual search within real-world scenes. Scientific Reports, 12, 948. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-04964-y

Bendall, R. C. A., Begley, S., & Thompson, C. (2021). Interactive influences of emotion and extraversion on visual attention. Brain and Behavior, 11, e2387. https://doi.org/10.1002/brb3.2387

Beevers, D. (2021). Seeing both sides: A student’s experience of dual roles in a university co-creation project. International Journal for Students as Partners, 5(2), 141-146.

Gregory, S. E. A., Kelly, C. L., & Kessler, K. (2021). Look into my “virtual” eyes: What dynamic virtual agents add to the realistic study of joint attention. Frontiers in Virtual Reality. https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2021.798899

Gregory, S, E. A., Wang, H., & Kessler, K. (2021). EEG alpha and theta signatures of socially and non-socially cued working memory in virtual reality. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, nsab123. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsab123

Chadwell, A., Kenney, L., Thies, S., Head, J., Galpin, A., & Baker, R. (2021). Addressing unpredictability may be the key to improving performance with current clinically prescribed myoelectric prostheses. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 1-15.  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-82764-6

Gregory, S. E. A. (2021). Investigating facilitatory versus inhibitory effects of dynamic social and non-social cues on attention in a realistic space. Psychological Research. doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fx3an

Gregory, S. E., & Jackson, M. C. (2020). Increased perceptual distraction and task demand enhances gaze and non-biological cuing effects. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021820959633 

Kenney, L. P. J., Kyberd, P., Galpin, A. J., Chadwell, A. E. A., Granat, M. H., Thies, S. B. A., & Head, J. S. (2020). Methods for clinical evaluation. In Kianoush Nazarpour (Ed). Control of Prosthetic Hands: Challenges and Emerging Avenues. The Institute of Engineering and Technology.

Bendall, R.C.A., Lambert, S. Galpin, A., Marrow, L.P., & Cassidy, S. (2019). Psychophysiological indices of cognitive style: A triangulated study incorporating neuroimaging, eye-tracking, psychometric and behavioral measures. Personality and Individual Differences, 44, 68-78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.02.034

Bendall, R. C A., Mohamed, A., & Thompson, C. (2019). Emotional real-world scenes impact visual search. Cognitive Processing, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1007/S10339-018-0898-x

Buckingham, G., Parr, J., Wood, G., Day, S., Chadwell, A., Head, J., Galpin, A., Kenney, L., Kyberd, P., Gowen, E., & Poliakoff, E. (2019). Upper- and lower-limb amputees show reduced levels of eeriness for images of prosthetic hands. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(4), 1295-1302. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-019-01612-x

Latif, I., Hughes, A.T., & Bendall, R.C. (2019). Positive and negative affect mediate the influences of a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy on sleep quality. Frontiers in psychiatry, 10, 628. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00628/full