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| Human Cognition |
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Cognitive psychologists are interested in complex mental acts such as object and face recognition, attention, memory storage and retrieval, as well as emotion recognition and moral decision making. Members of the Cognition group at St Andrews aim to describe these complex mental events as an orchestrated interaction of separable psychological processes or components. Beyond defining these components, the members of the Cognition group are also interested in how these components are implemented in the brain. There are several ways to isolate, define and describe these psychological processes. The main methodologies employed by the Cognition group are psychological experiments with healthy participants, neuropsychological single case and group studies, and studies on people with psychiatric disorders or who have experienced traumatic events. To link psychological processes to their underlying neural substrate, functional imaging studies are conducted. This field of research will expand in the future, because researches at St Andrews will have access to the 3 Tesla MRI scanner at the CRC Clinical Research Centre Dundee. In addition, our EEG lab facilities including a 72-channel EEG system allow us to gain access to the temporal dynamics of cognitive processes.
 Funding Work in this group has been funded by many organisations including,
Group Members 
Barbara works on cognitive deficits associated with depression, PTSD, Asperger’s Syndrome and closed head injury. She is particularly interested in qualitative changes in autobiographical memory retrieval and problem-solving abilities in these disorders. 
Ines is broadly interested in attention, focusing on cognitive interference and conflict control, and sequential effects in speeded response time tasks. She is also interested in the functional organisation of cortical motor structures involved in planning and control of voluntary movements as well as in developing new analysis methods for electrophysiological research. 
My research focuses on the cognitive components and neural substrates of willed action and executive control using neuropsychology, neuroimaging (fMRI) and pharmacology. My investigations are based on developing such paradigms into indices of corticostriatal function, in order to i) better understand neuropsychological deficits seen in diseases such as Parkinson's (PD) and ii) detect early deficits prior to and predictive of disease onset. 
Akira is interested in cognitive and neural bases of episodic memory judgments. He uses cognitive experimental and quantitative data methods as well as fMRI and fcMRI to investigate the way in which we make decisions about our memories. Research themes include sensations of memory (e.g. déjà vu, déjà vécu), memory-expectation conflict (i.e. how we respond to discrepancies between memory and expectation), and the interaction between functional connectivity and task-evoked activation in fMRI studies of memory. 
Gerry has interests in human working memory, in particular in visuo-spatial working memory. His research focuses on the active and passive component parts of working memory and the relationship that holds between them. 
Reiner's main focus of research is the neural substrate of facial expression recognition, particularly fear and disgust, and other aspects of social cognition. Recent work includes the FEEST, a neuropsychological test which aims to assess deficits in emotion recognition in people suffering from brain damage. Associate Members 
has research interests in social memory — particularly active forgetting processes in goal-directed memory and memory for self. He is also more broadly interested in social cognition processes involved in recovery and the role of memory in adjustment to traumatic events. |
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