Supervisors:
Professor Patric Bach - University of Aberdeen, School of Psychology - [Email Address Removed]
Dr Joost Rommers - University of Aberdeen, School of Psychology - [Email Address Removed]
Social interactions rely on our ability to see meaning in others’ behaviour. We see the excitement in our child running towards the shop window, the disgust when our friend brushes away a spider, or the exhaustion when our workout partner reaches for a drink. Sometimes, we misperceive the reason behind others’ behaviour, and we let them become coloured by our own preconceptions. Indeed, social problems in psychological conditions (e.g., in autism, schizophrenia or social anxiety), may emerge, in part, from such problems with reading, or misreading, other’s behaviour.
This PhD project combines psychophysical tasks developed by first supervisor Bach with state-of-the-art EEG methods of second supervisor Rommers to reveal the neurocognitive mechanisms underpinning these inferences. It relies on our recent research that reveals the attribution of meaning to others’ behaviour as a perceptual confirmation bias that subtly distorts observed behaviour. In these tasks, participants watch short snapshots of actions, such as a hand reaching for an object or withdrawing from it. When they then report the hand’s exact last seen location, judgments are systematically biased towards the goals we attribute to the other person, irrespective of what they really do: hands seem to have reached closer towards objects that the actors want, and further away from those they wanted to avoid. These distortions are highly robust across studies, stimulus sets and measurement methods. They therefore provide a precise quantitative measure of how prior beliefs about others colour the perception of their behaviour.
To uncover the neurocognitive mechanisms that underpin this integration of expectation and perception, the project will follow prior work of the 2nd supervisor that has already revealed such processes in language understanding. These studies provide target brain correlates that may describe the pre-activation of an action’s expected meaning (N400-like ERP components), the propagation of expectations through the brain (alpha oscillations), and their updating by new input (e.g., theta oscillations, late positive potentials).
The project will make important new steps in identifying how our expectations shape the perception of others’ behaviour and are, in turn, shaped by it. It would be suitable for candidates with a background in psychology, neuroscience, or biology with interests in social perception and electrophysiology. In their work, the PhD candidate will combine advanced psychophysical methods with temporal and spectral analyses of electrophysiological data. They will develop expertise in digital signal processing and programming (Matlab, R), both skills highly useful in industry and academia.
It may be possible to undertake this project part-time, in discussion with the lead supervisor, however, please note that part-time study is unavailable to students who require a Student Visa to study within the UK.
Application Procedure:
Please visit this page for full application information: http://www.eastscotbiodtp.ac.uk/how-apply-0
Please send your completed EASTBIO application form, along with academic transcripts to Alison Innes at [Email Address Removed]
Two references should be provided by the deadline using the EASTBIO reference form.
Please advise your referees to return the reference form to [Email Address Removed]
Unfortunately, due to workload constraints, we cannot consider incomplete applications
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