Within the Psychology Research Group, we are proud to consider ourselves as a supportive and collegiate team. We are continuously developing and expanding our research capacity and our research culture to deliver excellent, theory-informed, and applied research outputs.
CEDAR is our new Research Centre: the Centre for Mind and Creativity Research, led by Dr Marina Wimmer. The aims of the centre are to work collaboratively and across disciplines to investigate:
- How humans creatively and cognitively flexibly adapt to frequent environmental changes
- How the knowledge from human cognition can be used in the design of the built environment, software, and machines
In recent years we have watched our research culture grow, with an increasing number of postgraduate students, research assistants, and research interns joining our team, to create a thriving research community. We work on both theory driven and applied research, with the majority of our research having a strong multidisciplinary focus. We have existing collaborative links with non-psychologists within and out with the university, and with non-academic stakeholders too, to add real-world, applied value to our research.
We offer methodological expertise such as quantitative (statistical) expertise, qualitative expertise, and in developing and analysing applied, mixed methods projects. Our key research clusters are Forensic Psychology and Applied Cognition. However, our staff research across more areas than these, working with other groups within and out with the university, with some notable examples including occupational psychology, social psychology, and developmental psychology.
To support our research we have custom-designed psychology labs. These boast an observation lab, a 3D/4D lab, mobile and stationary eye-tracking equipment, a visual perception lab, and a neuroimaging laboratory (for fNIRS). We have a number of flexible lab rooms that can be adjusted to suit specific research projects, and our award winning psychology technician is highly trained and skilled in the key hard- and software for sophisticated experiments.