Fully Funded PhD Scholarship: Perceptual Face Training in Developmental Prosopagnosia and Alexithymia

This scholarship is funded by Swansea University’s Department of Psychology.

Subject areas: Psychology, Neroscience

Individuals have been identified who have severe difficulties recognising human faces (prosopagnosia); other individuals have trouble identifying facial expressions of emotion (e.g. alexithymia). The question remains about whether such socially debilitating cognitive impairments can be remediated. The PhD candidate will be primarily responsible for using an innovative online face-training programme to attempt to improve face recognition ability in prosopagnosic individuals and to improve the ability to recognise facial expressions of emotion in individuals with alexithymia.

This PhD project involves in-lab and online behavioural testing, including standardised neuropsychological tasks, questionnaires, and the training programme itself. In addition to behavioural outcomes we will also measure electroencephalography (EEG) to examine brain-activity changes in the response to faces as a result of the training programme. The student will have access to Department of Psychology testing facilities including behavioural testing rooms and a purpose-built EEG lab. For more information about our relevant previous research please visit our lab website.

The student will be jointly supervised by Dr Jodie Davies-Thompson and Dr John Towler, and by Dr Jeremy Tree as the third supervisor.

Eligibility

Candidate should have a 2.1 or above undergraduate degree and/or a Master’s degree or equivalent in psychology, neuroscience or computer science.

The candidate should preferably have some previous experience in research on face recognition. It would be desirable for the candidate to have experience in at least one neuroimaging technique (e.g. EEG, fMRI). It would also be desirable for the candidate to have experience with experimental software (e.g. E-prime, SuperLab) and statistical packages (e.g. SPSS, R, Matlab).

For details on the University’s English Language entry requirements, please visit – http://www.swansea.ac.uk/admissions/englishlanguagerequirements/

Due to funding restrictions, this scholarship is open to UK/EU candidates only.