News & Current projects
Where are we more productive? Here we examine creativity and cognitive flexibility in different environments (office, café, laboratory, nature) by using virtual reality: Research by Iyad Sawaftah (PhD candidate), Dr Lindsey Carruthers, Dr Marina Wimmer
False Memories for Fake news: Under which circumstances are we more likely to remember fake news and what is the effectiveness of fact checking? Research by Ted Webster (PhD candidate), Dr Faye Skelton, Dr Marina Wimmer
Our Staff
Dr Duncan Carmichael
My main area of research interest is multisensory perception. Most of my earlier research focused on synaesthesia, how it develops and how it might be linked to other aspects of cognition. My current research focuses mostly on smell and look at how smell interacts with other senses, such as vision.
Ongoing projects include trying to understand why smell training works and thinking about how multisensory perception might be used to improve smell training programmes. I’m also conducting research to understand more about the treatment options available for people with smell loss in Scotland. In collaboration with colleagues at the Scotch Whisky Research Institute, we are carrying out research developing novel sensory methods of assessing flavour in spirit drinks.
Dr Lindsey Carruthers
My main research interest is in the psychology of creativity, and cognitive processes involved. Specifically, is attention/ADHD related to creative thinking and/or performance? I’m also interested in the phenomenon of incubation periods, how creativity and problem-solving work can be improved when we take a break and stop focusing on the task. Other areas include decision-making and decision construction, bilingualism, teacher’s decision making when identifying dyslexia, the link between creative performance and Narcissism, malevolent creativity, and creativity and STEM in the classroom. My methods are almost always quantitative, and I’m an active postgraduate research supervisor.
Dr Eleanor Drake
I am interested in speech as a concrete and language as an abstract. My research uses and explores the concept of ‘inner speech’, which has been variously viewed within cognitive psychology as both an abstraction of and a precursor to speech itself. I am interested in how changes in the immediate physical and psychological environment impact how we speak and how we understand language.
Dr Nina Fisher
My main research focuses on the effects of music playing and music listening, and generally the effects of sound on performance, e.g. the effects of background noise on a range of cognitive abilities. I also do work investigating how perceptions of autism affect attitudes towards individuals with autism in the workplace.
Dr Nikos Gkekas
My main research interest is understanding how humans learn from the statistical properties of our environment in a process that appears to be seamless and automatic. I have looked at the role of prior expectations in perception, the limits of complexity of what can be learned, and how learning mechanisms of different temporal and structural properties interact.
A complimentary research interest is understanding the neural mechanisms of low- to mid-level vision. Specifically, the investigation of canonical neural computations (normalization, lateral inhibition, probabilistic formulations) that are potentially repeated across different levels of the cortex and are responsible for organizing incoming information into increasingly complex perceptual representations.
Current research topics include adaptation and learning at different timescales, motion and speed perception, serial effects and probabilistic models of perception.
Dr Rory MacLean
My main research interest is the psychology of creativity, particularly its relation to cognition (e.g., cognitive ageing) and individual differences (e.g., personality), and how it can be assessed. My other research interests mainly focus around cognition and personality, often with a forensic angle. Previous or current projects include jury decision-making, narcissism, inter-partner violence, and child eyewitness testimony. I have also provided statistical and methodological support to a number of other projects.
Dr Alex McIntyre
Dr Judith Okely
I am interested in the Psychology of Ageing and cognitive ageing (changes in thinking, reasoning and memory skills) in particular. This topic is important because age-related cognitive decline (even without dementia diagnosis) impairs daily activities, is associated with poorer health and financial decision making, and predicts declines in physical and mental health. I use large-scale datasets with information collected from older people over time to study how cognitive abilities change with ageing and to identify some of the predictors of healthy cognitive ageing. I have explored the potential effects of loneliness, physical fitness, hearing impairment and, most recently, musical experience on cognitive and other outcomes in older age.
Dr Barbara Piotrowska
I am interested in how people learn to read. I have investigated the causes and key predictors of developmental dyslexia in children and adults. I am also interested in understanding of how stereotypes about dyslexia can impact perception of one’s abilities and performance. Also, I’ve been investigating cognitive processes behind teachers’ judgements of dyslexia risk in primary school children.
Dr Faye Skelton
I am particularly interested in how we perceive and recognise faces, especially in forensic settings i.e. eyewitness testimony, suspect identification (‘line-ups’) and police facial composites (‘E-FITs’). Over the last 15 years I’ve worked primarily on improving the recognition of police facial composites of suspects using both feature-based (e.g. PROfit) and evolutionary (e.g. EvoFIT) software systems.
I’m also broadly interested in other aspects of cognition in forensic settings including witness and suspect interviews, false confessions, false and recovered memories, and detection of deception.
I enjoy public engagement and have written and delivered events for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Edinburgh International Science Festival, Northern Ireland and Cheltenham Science Festivals, several UK skeptics societies, community groups, and other specialist groups.
Dr Michael Stirrat
I completed my PhD at St Andrews University in 2009 exploring the evolution of trusting and cooperative decision making as influenced by the perception of facial characteristics. This has led to exploring the perceptions of aggression in faces and how trust breaks down. My research still broadly revolves around the evolution of human cooperation, whether looking at the perception of MMA fighters on the one hand or attitudes to feminism on the other.
Prior to this I studied Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence (MA) at Edinburgh University and theoretical biology (Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems) at Sussex University.
I joined Edinburgh Napier in January 2023 as a lecturer in Social Psychology and currently teach Social Psychology at various levels.
Current research interests:
I am currently keen to supervise topics in forensic psychology around Gaslighting and Coercive Control but would be interested in topics in any of the following broad areas: Evolution of Cooperation – the psychology of Trust, Risk, and Aggression; Social Attributions/Person Perception; Social Decision Making; Psychology of Religion.
Dr Marina Wimmer
I am interested in how our mind deals with visual ambiguities, why people perceive stimuli in different ways and their link to creativity and cognitive flexibility. I am also interested in mental imagery (“seeing” in our mind) and false memories (remembering events differently than they have happened or remembering events that have never happened) in both children and adults.
I am the Associate Editor for the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, Member of the ESRC Peer Review College, Carnegie Assessment Panel Member, Member of the Experimental Psychology Society.
I have founded and co-lead the Centre for Mind, Creativity, and Environment Research (CEDAR). CEDAR addresses how humans creatively and cognitively flexibly respond to environmental changes and applies this understanding to the design of the built environment, software engineering, and machine learning.