School of Psychology

Postgraduate Research Interests

I am happy to discuss projects related to perception, action, attention or cognitive control.  Our lab employs techniques including fMRI, MEG, TMS, MR spectroscopy, eye-tracking, basic modelling and behavioural tasks with both healthy volunteers and patients with brain damage.

Particular interests at the moment involve the relationship between voluntary control and reflexive or unconscious mechanisms, and the modelling of automatic disturbances to eye movements. We are also embarking on a series of studies investigating why normal healthy people differ so much in very basic things, like their ability to inhibit responses, or the speed at which they adapt to prism goggles. We expect to expand this work into populations with mental disorders (e.g. schizophrenia), and to incorporate genetics.

I also maintain an interest in perception from an evolutionary perspective. The brain was not designed by an engineer, but has evolved incrementally according to what characteristics offered advantages in survival and mating. For example, our colour vision, which is shared by many primates but not by other animals, is optimised for finding a diet of fruit and leaves in rain forests.

Joint supervision is always possible with other members of staff, or possibly with collaborators in Bristol, London or Bangor.

For an introduction to some of our work, see the Research page, and, for example:

Sumner, P. and Husain, M (2008). At the edge of consciousness: automatic motor activation and voluntary control. The Neuroscientist,14, 474-486.

Sumner, P., Nachev, P., Morris, P., Peters, A. M., Jackson, S. R., Kennard, C., & Husain, M. (2007). Human medial frontal cortex mediates unconscious inhibition of voluntary action. Neuron. 54, 697 711.

Sumner, P. (2007). Negative and positive masked-priming – implications for motor inhibition. Advances in Cognitive Psychology, 3, 317-326.

Current Students

Ursula Budnik. Ursula has investigated the effect brain damage to frontal and subcortical areas has on basic perceptual ability. It is thought that via top-down pathways, even brain areas associated mostly with action control can affect basic perception. Ursula has also used subliminal priming to investigate differences between in the processing of foveal and peripheral stimuli.

Chris Allen (jointly supervised by Chris Chambers). Chris is investigating what makes us aware or not aware of visual stimuli. The project so far involves transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and magnetoencephalography (MEG).

Georgina Powell. Georgie’s project addresses the question: why do we often not see what our eyes are telling our brain? The main question we hope to investigate is why we don’t see colour afterimages very much in everyday life, even though they are very easy to evoke in demonstrations.

Sian Griffiths (jointly supervised by Krish Singh). Sian is investigating the visual pathways from the eye to brain that appear to miss out primary visual cortex (V1). These pathways are thought to be especially important for patients who have damage to V1, and the project hopes to test such patients in the future. So far Sian is employing magnetoencephalography (MEG), and expects also to incorporate experiments with fMRI.

David Maidment (jointly supervised by Bill Macken). David’s project is on short term memory , and as such much more aligned with Bill’s work than mine. The overlap is the theory that auditory information undergoes automatic perceptual-motor mapping, and thus it may be that the very same brain areas are involved in perceiving and remembering sequences as in planning a sequence of motor actions.

Previous Students

Christina Howard (Jointly supervised by Alex Holcombe and Dylan Jones). Christina studied how attention is allocated to multiple dynamic objects (Alex Holcombe was her primary supervisor, but left Cardiff to take a position in Sydney in Christina’s final year). Christina also investigated the relationship between attention and crowding. She is now a post-doctoral researcher in Bristol.

Lois Grayson (Jointly supervised by Alex Holcombe and Josie Briscoe). Lois studied perceptual integration in Autism also the relationship between perceptual integration and autistic spectrum traits in healthy students (I took over a supervisory role after Josie took a position in Bristol and Alex in Sydney).