We offer a range of PhD studentships funded by research councils or charities. General information about these can be found under ‘Funding opportunities’.
To apply to study for a PhD at the Department of Psychology, please complete ALL the steps outlined below. To be considered for a studentship, your application will have to reach us by the deadlines advertised under step 3 and 4.
To begin the process, you will need to find a PhD supervisor whose research interests align with your own. You will need to contact them to discuss your application and the development of your research proposal. To help with this process, we advertise below ‘project ideas’ staff have proposed as starting points for the development of a research proposal. The project ideas are organised by research community (although many fall into more than one research community). Please read the advertised project ideas and additional information and contact the main supervisor to discuss the development of your research proposal. If you have an idea for a project that is not listed here, but which falls within the research area of a member of our staff, most staff are happy to be contacted about that. Just send them an email outlining your idea. You can find out about our staff's research interests by visiting our People pages.
Please contact your proposed supervisor as early as possible as developing your research proposal will take time.
As a department, we particularly encourage applications to work with early career staff. This year these include: Dr Carly Anderson, Dr Abigail Fiske, Dr Alice Milne, Dr Alice Rees, and Dr Heather Shaw. Applications to work with these members of staff are weighted preferentially at the short-listing stage for the Faculty studentship.
Apply to Lancaster University through the Lancaster University Admissions Portal. Please complete this step at least 2 weeks before the submission deadline mentioned under steps 3 and 4.
If you wish to be considered for NWSSDTP funding, you need to apply to the NWSSDTP in addition to completing steps 2 and 4. Please follow the instructions on the NWSSDTP website and submit your application to them 5pm on Monday 2nd February 2026
Apply to the Department of Psychology by filling out our form. You will be asked to answer a few questions about your application and to upload a single PDF file that contains all the documents you have submitted under Step 2 and Step 3 (if applicable). If you wish to be considered for an NWSSDTP, Faculty, or Joint LU-China Scholarship Council Studentship, please complete this step by 5pm on Monday 2nd February 2026.
We will work with Lancaster University Admissions and with the NWSSDTP to process your application. After the closing date, we will consider all applications and invite shortlisted candidates for an interview. Interviews will usually be held via Teams. The timescale for this will vary but is in the region of 4 weeks following the application deadline.
If you have any questions about your application, please contact the postgraduate coordinators by emailing postgraduate.psychology@lancaster.ac.uk.
Have you ever caught yourself muttering under your breath while solving a puzzle or working through a difficult problem? This self-directed talk, or private speech, may be far more than just a quirky habit. It could be a fundamental mechanism through which language shapes our thinking, guides our actions, and helps us navigate uncertainty.
This project investigates how we use language not just to communicate with others, but to augment our cognitive processes. You'll build and analyse a dataset of spontaneous private speech recorded during different mental activities: from mind wandering to solving complex problems like planning tasks, mathematical challenges, and self-regulation exercises. Using cutting-edge corpus linguistics and computational methods, you'll uncover how the content and form of our self-talk adapts dynamically across different contexts, thereby revealing distinct patterns that differ markedly from ordinary conversation.
The research tests predictions from Linguistic Active Inference Theory, which proposes that inner speech actively modulates our predictions about the world to reduce uncertainty. By analysing the semantic patterns, condensed forms, and temporal dynamics of private speech, you'll explore whether and how language cycles through perception and action. You may also integrate physiological and neural recordings to link specific speech patterns with brain activity, stress responses, and cognitive states.
This work pioneers new methodologies for studying consciousness and cognition through naturalistic language production, with implications for understanding thinking, decision-making, and mental health. You'll develop expertise spanning linguistics, cognitive science, computational analysis, positioning yourself at the forefront of an emerging interdisciplinary field.
Project supervisor: Bo Yao
Contact: b.yao1@lancaster.ac.uk
The brain is a sophisticated prediction engine that uses language to anticipate perceptions, guide actions, and construct identity. During adolescence, this system confronts unprecedented challenges: the brain rewires itself whilst navigating intensified social pressures, information overload, and identity formation. When linguistic prediction falters, mental health vulnerabilities emerge—intrusive thoughts feel alien, rumination spirals, and social signals become illegible.
This PhD shifts the paradigm in youth mental wellbeing research. Rather than studying diagnosed conditions, you will investigate fundamental mechanisms, identifying subtle signatures of when the brain's linguistic prediction system begins to fail. You will work primarily with healthy young people experiencing typical adolescent stress and self-doubt, using methods spanning phenomenological interviews, computational behavioural tasks, and neurophysiological recordings.
This is fundamental research into how language prediction shapes mental experience. Your work will establish foundational science, mapping how variation in these mechanisms relates to different experiences of distress, worry, and self-perception across everyday adolescence and at-risk populations. If you are intellectually ambitious and fascinated by the intersection of language, prediction, and mental experience, this project offers the opportunity to establish theoretical frameworks, empirical evidence, and a toolkit that could transform how we understand the mental health spectrum and vulnerability.
Project supervisor: Bo Yao
Contact: b.yao1@lancaster.ac.uk
Creativity plays an essential role in wellbeing, such as finding pleasure and meaning in life, in personal growth, academic performance, but also professional performance and satisfaction. Furthermore, creativity can be a catalyst for entrepreneurial initiatives, and trigger economic and social change. One of the most effective methods to enhance creativity is trough mindfulness meditation. However, the literature also shows mixed findings, in that different meditation practices can enhance or hamper or show no effect on creativity. Also, different types of creativity can be differently affected.
The present project aims to:
Methodology
In addition to lab-based creativity tasks, this project will assess creativity by having people produce art products such as dance performance, visual art, or music, which will allow for better generalisation of findings to ‘the real world’. There is also scope for measuring EEG responses during meditative practices.
Ultimately, the findings will represent the groundwork for developing a creativity enhancement intervention programme.
References:
Lebuda, I., Zabelina, D. L., & Karwowski, M. (2016). Mind full of ideas: A meta-analysis of the mindfulness–creativity link. Personality and Individual Differences, 93, 22-26.
Bashmakova, I., & Shcherbakova, O. (2021). Just open your mind? A randomized, controlled study on the effects of meditation on creativity. Frontiers in psychology, 1685.
Lippelt, D. P., Hommel, B., & Colzato, L. S. (2014). Focused attention, open monitoring and loving kindness meditation: effects on attention, conflict monitoring, and creativity–A review. Frontiers in psychology, 5, 1083.
Project supervisors: Francesca Citron and Marina Bazhydai
Contact: f.citron@lancaster.ac.uk
Multilinguals, i.e., people who speak more than one language fluently in their daily life, typically experience more emotional distance from their second or non-dominant language (see review by Pavlenko, 2012). Many factors can drive this difference, for example how early in life the second language was acquired, personal identification with one or the other language more strongly, proficiency in the second language, but also the specific culture of the multilingual speaker (e.g., Hsu et al., 2015; Kroll et al., 2015).
In this project we will look at affective and cognitive responses to the native (L1) versus second language (L2), by specifically manipulating the content of texts or spoken discourse and make it relevant to one’s native culture or not. Through a series of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments we will measure emotional engagement in response to language, and tease apart effects due to L1, proficiency or immersion in the L2, compared to effects due to cultural relevance. Even though texts and discourse are mentioned, there is scope for the student to choose whichever materials they prefer: single words, short dialogues, film excerpts, fiction books, etc.
Research questions:
1) What is the time course of emotional engagement during L2 processing?
2) Does the content of L2, e.g., relevant to native vs. L2 culture make a difference?
3) How can we most effectively communicate within intercultural groups?
Ultimately this project may provide initial guidelines on intercultural discourse, and how to best engage, and effectively communicate with, interlocutors from different cultures.
Initial references:
• Hsu, C.-T., Jacobs, A.M., & Conrad, M. (2015). Can Harry Potter still put a spell on us in a second language? An fMRI study on reading emotion-laden literature in late bilinguals. Cortex, 63, 282-295.
• Kroll, J.F., Dussias, P.E., Bice, K., & Perrotti, L. (2015). Bilingualism, mind, and brain. Annual Review of Linguistics, 1, 377-394.
• Pavlenko, A. (2012). Affective processing in bilingual speakers: disembodied cognition? International Journal of Psychology, 47, 892-902.
Supervisor: Francesca Citron
Contact: f.citron@lancaster.ac.uk
Digital reading is now ubiquitous in our education, leisure time, and professional lives. Digital reading can involve a range of delivery devices: smartphones, tablets, laptops, as well as e-readers, and the devices, formats, and interactional opportunities change and develop at pace. There are concerns (and evidence) that comprehension and learning may be poorer for information presented on screen compared to hard-copy paper-based text. Projects might explore how readers’ frequency and quality of exposure to digital at home and in the classroom interact with individual differences traditionally associated with comprehension and learning.
Supervisor: Kate Cain
Contact: k.cain@lancaster.ac.uk
Accurate and efficient word recognition skills are associated with better reading comprehension, but are they sufficient? Despite an increasing emphasis on instruction in reading fluency by policy makers, researchers present a more nuanced interpretation of these associations. (1) There is evidence of bi-directional relations: fluency supports comprehension processing, and good comprehension results in fluent reading. (2) Dysfluencies when reading can signal that a reader is actively processing a text for meaning and engaging in strategic processing. (3) Fluency is regarded as a multidimensional construct, such that different aspects of reading fluency may be related to different aspects of reading. Projects that seek to explore these relations and, in particular, to test potential causal mechanisms are invited.
Supervisor: Kate Cain
Contact: k.cain@lancaster.ac.uk
It is well established that abstract syntactic priming effects, the repetition of syntactic structures but not lexical items across utterances, reflect speakers stored representations of grammar. Therefore, syntactic priming studies provide a powerful tool for studying the nature of speakers' representations - by varying the form and presentation of structures, we can observe where priming effects occur and make inferences about the representations involved. As such, we can use these studies to understand when L2 learners acquire abstract vs lexically-restricted representations of structure. We can also use these to explore the form of those developing representations - do learners have interlanguage variations in structures and when do their representations become nativelike? Projects could explore these effects in speakers' comprehension or production using L2 learners studying at the University or from further afield.
Supervisor: Kate Messenger
Contact: k.messenger@lancaster.ac.uk
Syntactic alignment, or priming, is a robustly established phenomenon which has been widely applied to questions of language representation, acquisition and processing. Syntactic alignment is observed a cross a wide range of speaker populations, languages, language modalities, contexts, structures and experimental methods. In all studies, there is, however, large variation in the extent to which speakers exhibit alignment but the reasons for this remain unknown. Understanding more about why people do or do not align their language with interlocutors can enhance our understanding of the mechanisms and functions of alignment.
Projects could explore any of the following possible avenues of explanation: linguistic reasons for differences in priming, e.g. do those with greater knowledge of language show more priming, how does accent or dialect influence alignment; cognitive reasons (memory, attention) for differences in priming, e.g. are speakers less likely to prime if they are distracted or if their working memory is taxed; socio-cognitive reasons for variation in priming effects, e.g. are speakers more likely to align if they are more empathetic or more pro-social, or if their conversation partner is more like them?
Supervisor: Kate Messenger
Contact: k.messenger@lancaster.ac.uk
Gesture production influences language processing (Kita et al., 2017). Both adults and children perform better on language tasks if they are allowed to gesture. Relatedly, Mumford et al. (2023) found that encouraging 3-year-old to point with the right, but not the left, hand gave them a performance advantage on a word learning task. It has been suggested that producing gestures increases activation in brain areas involved in language processing, making it easier to form and access language representations. In this project, we will use transcranial Doppler ultrasound to measure brain activation directly, rather than rely on assumed language lateralisation based on performance on handedness tasks as has been done in previous studies. If right-handed pointing leads to increased left hemisphere activation, there should be an increased blood flow to left-hemisphere areas involved in language. Additionally, we will include children at risk for atypical language development and explore whether individual differences in gesture use are predictive of differences in language development in these groups.
Supervisor: Dr. Margriet A. Groen
Contact: m.groen@lancaster.ac.uk
Prosody—or the intonation and rhythm of speech—affects the interpretation of spoken sentences, by assisting listeners in segmenting sentences into syntactically and semantically appropriate chunks (Carlson, 2009; Cutler et al., 1997). More controversially, it has also been argued that implicit prosody facilitates comprehension of written material (Fodor, 2002; Webman-Shafran, 2017), and in the reading acquisition literature, the prosody with which a child reads a text has been consistently associated with that child’s reading comprehension level (Veenendaal et al., 2015). In this project, we will investigate whether adults and developing readers indeed use prosody in parsing written sentences using psycholinguistic and electrophysiological methods.
Supervisor: Dr. Margriet A. Groen
Contact: m.groen@lancaster.ac.uk
Learned sequences play a fundamental role in human socio-cultural behaviour, most notably through language production, which depends upon the correct ordering of familiar words and phrases, but also in music, skilled motor behaviour—including sports and manual skills—and spatial navigation. While research has produced detailed theories of how people retain sequences over the short term, far less is known about how sequences become learned and consolidated with practice. This PhD project will investigate the cognitive and computational mechanisms that support sequence learning. The project will involve a series of behavioural experiments in which participants learn verbal sequences over repeated study-test trials. These data, combined with existing findings, will inform the development of an integrated mathematical model that explains both immediate memory for serial order and longer-term sequence learning. Two core questions will guide the project. First, how do people recognise a sequence they have seen before? We will test the hypothesis that sequence recognition relies on a cumulative matching process that progressively narrows down stored candidates as more of the sequence unfolds. Successful recognition is essential, as learning can only occur when a sequence is detected as familiar. Second, how is serial order represented during learning? Competing theories propose item-item associations, item-position associations, or hierarchical groupings. By comparing human performance with model predictions, we will identify which mechanism—or combination—best explains sequence learning. This work will advance theories of human memory and inform domains where ordered learning is critical, such as language acquisition.
Supervisor: Dr Mark Hurlstone
Contact: m.hurlstone@lancaster.ac.uk
Sound symbolism describes the link between the sound of a word and its meaning, challenging the convention that sounds and meanings of words bear an arbitrary relation. In this project, the extent and realisation of sound-meaning relations across languages will be investigated. This will enable us to determine which sound symbolic properties are language-specific and which might be general across languages, enabling us to unpack the role of sound symbolism in natural language processing and language evolution.
Supervisor: Padraic Monaghan
Contact: p.monaghan@lancaster.ac.uk
There is an interesting juxtaposition between language comprehension and production in that listeners’ comprehension is facilitated by predictable content however adults often produce less predictable content. For example, when talking about stabbing adults are more likely to specify “with an ice-pick” than “with a knife” (Brown & Dell, 1987; Lockeridge & Brennan, 2002). Adult speakers often use their world knowledge to guide their choices when speaking and frequently omit information that would be deemed obvious. This follows from Grice’s principle of informativity whereby we expect listeners to produce appropriately informative utterances. This raises an interesting question for children; children have less world knowledge than adults and thus what is informative for an adult may not necessarily be the same for children. According to Greenfield’s principle of informativeness (Greenfield, 1979; Greenfield & Smith, 1976) children will also choose to talk about atypical things and things that are not obvious.
Supervisor: Alice Rees
Contact: a.rees3@lancaster.ac.uk
As humans we have an impressive communicative ability where we can convey information without having to explicitly state it. Consider the following interaction:
A: “Have you met Charlie’s new boyfriend? He’s handsome and intelligent”B: “Yes, he is handsome.”
You would be entitled to infer that B is communicating that Charlie’s new boyfriend is not intelligent (Grice, 1975; Levinson, 2000). This is an example of a classic pragmatic inference whereby a listener has inferred a speaker’s intended meaning. There’s a strong body of literature addressing the questions around how listeners reach the pragmatic inference that is implied by a speaker (see Grice, Levinson; Sperber & Wilson etc). However very little attention has been paid to how speakers come to imply such messages. However, an open question is how does a speaker plan for the things they don’t say?
In this project we are aiming to investigate language production and the role pragmatics plays in producing an utterance. There are multiple ways of communicating the same message, so what factors drive the production choices of a speaker and are speaker’s planning for the information they ultimately do not articulate.
Supervisor: Alice Rees
Contact: a.rees3@lancaster.ac.uk
Much of our day-to-day activities revolve around social media platforms which are increasingly including subtitles for spoken content. Instagram reels and Tiktok videos allow users to submit their own captions or provide auto captioning. Once reserved for those hard of hearing, captions and subtitles are becoming more commonplace, even within education. Recorded lectures often include subtitles for reasons of accessibility, and there is evidence that subtitles improve comprehension for non-native speakers (Caimi, 2006; Liao et al., 2020; Van Gauwbergen et al., 2024) and benefit students with diverse learning needs (Robert et al., 2021; Mayer, 2020). There is an opportunity to use subtitles during live lectures too, this however is less commonplace.
What are the consequences of introducing subtitling to live lectures? A key question and concern are the impact of integrating information across multiple modalities and the task switching costs students may face. There is the further question of attention and distraction during teaching and then the longer-term impacts on information comprehension and learning. There are a range of opportunities to develop a project within this sphere.
Areas for investigation could include for example (1) cross-modal integration of information, (3) language comprehension (2) attention allocation, (3) cognitive load, or (4) long term impact on learning.
Supervisor: Alice Rees
Contact: a.rees3@lancaster.ac.uk
In recent years some researchers have begun to focus on the active role infants play in their own learning. In my lab we investigate the behaviours and exploration strategies employed by infants to understand what drives such intrinsically motivated exploration and how it relates to infants’ learning. This PhD project would explore these questions further. For example, studies can investigate whether infants prefer to learn additional information about objects for which they already have some knowledge, or whether they prefer to engage with wholly new objects instead – and whether this preference changes over the first three years of life. Other studies can test the interaction between the complexity and novelty of objects in attracting infants’ attention, and how exploration strategies change with age as knowledge is accumulated. Overall, these projects will enable us to gain insights into the development of semantic networks in infants and toddlers over the first years of life. The main method of this project will be (gaze-contingent) eye tracking, but neurophysiological and motion-tracking studies would also be possible.
Supervisor: Gert Westermann
Contact: g.westermann@lancaster.ac.uk
Infants and older children play an active role in their learning through intrinsically motivated exploration of their environment. One mechanism that has been suggested to explain such exploratory behaviour is learning progress maximisation: learners choose at each point information from which they can learn maximally. We implemented such active exploration in a neural network of infant categorisation (Twomey & Westermann, 2018) which suggested that infants’ exploratory choices are affected by what information is available to them, their existing knowledge, and the learning mechanism itself. The focus of this PhD project is to develop this model further to gain a deeper understanding of the factors shaping active exploration in infants’ knowledge acquisition. There is also the opportunity to complement the modelling work with experimental studies to compare model and infant behaviours.
One strand of investigation could examine the role of early language on shaping knowledge and active exploration by presenting objects to the model (and infants) with and without labels and analysing the resulting object representations. Another strand could examine the interplay between short- and long-term knowledge in shaping exploration strategies for new objects. A third strand could investigate the relation between learning progress maximisation and prediction error minimisation as two related explanations for active exploration in young children. Overall, this project would aim to gain a better understanding of the factors driving and shaping infants’ and toddlers’ active learning about the world around them.
Supervisor: Gert Westermann
Contact: g.westermann@lancaster.ac.uk
This impactful PhD project focuses on improving experiences for deaf children and young people. Patient-Reported Experience Measures (PREMs) play a crucial role in shaping high-quality, patient-centred care. The adult PREM for Hearing Loss in Audiology care has recently been developed. But no tool exists for children or young people. This project aims to address that gap by developing a child- and young person-centred PREM that captures the voices, preferences, and lived experiences of school-aged deaf children and young people.
You will work in the PELiCAN lab at Lancaster University with your second supervisor at Aston University. This PhD project will build on innovative workshop techniques already co-created with deaf children and young people. The project will involve running creative, accessible workshops; conducting in-depth qualitative research; and working closely with Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) partners.
This PhD offers training in participatory design, and deaf awareness, alongside opportunities to contribute to meaningful change in clinical practice. We strongly encourage applicants from a wide range of backgrounds, including those with and without prior experience in audiology. Most importantly, we are looking for a motivated student with a passion for working with children and young people, co-production, inclusivity, and improving outcomes for deaf children and their families.
Supervisor: Hannah Stewart and Amanda Hall (Aston University)
Contact: h.stewart5@lancaster.ac.uk
Morphemes are the building blocks of words; they are the smallest units in a language that carry meaning. Consider the word ‘beauty’. This comprises a single morpheme and means ‘attractive’. ‘Beautiful’ is a word comprising two morphemes; the base word ‘beauty’ and a suffix ‘-ful’. When these two morphemes are put together, they create a new word meaning ‘something with an attractive quality’. More than 50% of all new words that children encounter when reading are multimorphemic words; they comprise two or more morphemes such as ‘beauti-ful’ or ‘un-beauti-ful’. Children with good morphological awareness can derive the meanings of new multi-morphemic words such as ‘beautification’ and, through this, increase their vocabulary knowledge, word reading, and reading comprehension. In this way, morphological awareness is a powerful self-teaching mechanism. Project proposals that explore the relation between different types of morphological awareness and reading comprehension are invited.
Supervisor: Kate Cain
Contact: k.cain@lancaster.ac.uk
This project will explore models which invoke prediction error-based implicit learning mechanisms for language acquisition (Dell & Chang, 2014). We know that children can learn how to describe events with different sentence forms from their immediate experiences of syntactic structures but the mechanisms underlying how children learn in this kind of context remain a mystery. In particular, extending research in this area, which has mostly relied on production studies, to comprehension measures would allow different questions to be addressed. There is considerable scope to extend existing research to different languages, structures, and age groups in order to explore the universality of such mechanisms as well as to refine our understanding of them.
Supervisor: Kate Messenger
Contact: k.messenger@lancaster.ac.uk
We know that a "snapshot" of children's early language - especially the words they speak - is not a very good way to work out which children will go on to have later language difficulties. Many children who are late to talk bloom quickly and catch up - but some do not. These are often children who have poor language comprehension at an early age as well as poor spoken language, but it is much harder to assess children's language comprehension - parents can give us a good idea of what children aged 2, for example, can say but often find it harder to work out what they can understand. This project is flexible, but may include developing ways for parents to work out what their children can understand, looking at how language comprehension can predict later language difficulties, and comparing snapshots to trajectories of language development in predicting later language difficulties.
Supervisor: Katie Alcock
Contact: k.j.alcock@lancaster.ac.uk
Adults and children who are autistic are also more likely to suffer from gender dysphoria, in which their sexed body becomes distressing and they often seek to alter its characteristics. This goes beyond being gender-non-conforming but being happy about not fitting a mould - it can lead to mental poor health. Some research suggests that this increased likelihood of a distressing mental health condition is moderated by cognitive skills that are different in autistic individuals compared to non-autistic individuals. This project might work with either adults or children who are autistic, looking at the skills they hold and the influence these have on the distressing thoughts individuals have. Previous studies have looked at empathising (mental "mind-reading") and systemising (preferring order and organisation) but we will look at these and beyond to factors like menstrual/puberty distress, social media influences, and the influence of sex/gender stereotypes from society at large.
Supervisor: Katie Alcock
Contact: k.j.alcock@lancaster.ac.uk
This project focuses on children as vital stakeholders and potential environmental advocates who both actively seek out and share knowledge about pro-environment issues. We aim to answer the following questions: Does curiosity motivate pro-environmental learning and advocacy? What is the effect of informant cues and pro-environmental curiosity on children’s knowledge sharing? First, we aim to develop and validate an age-appropriate psychometric tool for assessing children’s level of curiosity about pro-environmental practices. The tool will be designed not only to identify what children currently know about environmental issues, but also their motivation to learn more; methods for doing this; their desire to communicate what they know with others and what actions they have begun to take. Second, we aim to test the causal role of curiosity as a causal driver of pro-environmental learning and advocacy using experimental paradigms. The project will involve using mixed methods: questionnaires and experimental lab based tasks with children aged 7-12 years.
Supervisors: Dr Jared Piazza and Dr Marina Bazhydai
Contact: j.piazza@lancaster.ac.uk and m.bazhydai@lancaster.ac.uk
This project would investigate the intricate relationship between curiosity and creativity using longitudinal or cross-sectional mixed methods design. While the conceptual and theoretical links between curiosity and creativity have been proposed, empirical research, especially in developmental populations, demonstrating the relationship between these multi-dimensional psychological constructs and the underlying cognitive mechanisms is in its infancy. Furthermore, the predictive value of each concept on academic and well-being outcomes remains under-explored. In this project, children (as early as in infancy) will be tested using age appropriate measures of curiosity and creativity, utilising different approaches, from experimental to self- and other-report. In addition to shedding light on the theoretical psychological links between curiosity and creativity, the project has a potential to make substantial methodological advances to the field of research on both curiosity and creativity.
Supervisor: Dr Marina Bazhydai
Contact: m.bazhydai@lancaster.ac.uk
Children are curious learners, actively seeking information both through independent exploration and social learning. They are also able to share what they know with others from infancy, thus taking an active role in the social knowledge transmission process. This project would aim to investigate the connections between child-led information seeking and information sharing in young children. Through a series of experimental studies, it will pose research questions such as, how does active solicitation of information impact its subsequent transmission in childhood, e.g., whether curiosity-driven motivation to obtain new knowledge makes such knowledge more likely to be shared, what are the characteristics of information or informants themselves that make children more likely to share such knowledge, and what is the role of individual differences in both sides of the process. This line of investigation can include behavioural, including online interactive methods, and eye-tracking, including head-mounted or gaze contingent methods.
Supervisor: Dr Marina Bazhydai
Contact: m.bazhydai@lancaster.ac.uk
From infancy, children take an active role in sharing knowledge by actively seeking and transmitting information. While children’s role as active learners has received a lot of attention, their role as active transmitters of information and the factors that influence their transmission have remained relatively under-explored. Children begin actively transmitting information from infancy, and their transmission is influenced by the type of information that they transmit, among several other factors (for a review, see Ronfard & Harris, 2018). In this project, a series of experimental behavioural studies, possibly using a longitudinal design, would systematically investigate the role of the information source (e.g., the characteristics of the informant, such as competence and attractiveness) and the learning context (e.g., independently acquiring information vs via social learning). For example, studies could investigate whether social (e.g., confidence, deference to majority, ingroup status) vs epistemic (e.g., reliability, accuracy, expert status) characteristics of available social partners play a more important role in guiding children’s information transmission choices, or whether the property of information itself is selectively preferred (e.g., normative (how to do it properly, how to play a game) vs informative/instrumental (e.g., a novel word label or a function of novel toy). These studies will shed light on children’s evaluation of information and its sources in making decisions for sharing information as members of the broader society and the cognitive mechanisms underlying children’s selective teaching.
Supervisor: Dr Marina Bazhydai
Contact: m.bazhydai@lancaster.ac.uk
Have you ever caught yourself thinking in words - planning what to say next, rehearsing a difficult conversation, or talking yourself through a problem? This internal monologue, called inner speech, is one of the most intimate yet invisible aspects of human cognition. Despite its ubiquity in our mental lives, we know remarkably little about when and how inner speech naturally occurs during everyday thinking. This project tackles one of cognitive neuroscience's most elusive puzzles: detecting the spontaneous emergence of inner speech in the electrical symphony of brain activity.
The fundamental challenge is profound - we cannot directly observe inner speech as it happens naturally. When someone is planning their day, regulating their emotions, or reasoning through a dilemma, we have no ground truth for whether their brain is using silent words or other forms of thought. This project develops an innovative solution through transfer learning and explainable AI. We will first train machine learning models on controlled tasks where participants explicitly engage in inner speech on command, creating a neural fingerprint of this phenomenon. By contrasting these patterns with tasks that definitively exclude inner speech, and by synthesising realistic noisy data that mimics the complexity of natural thinking, we can build robust detection algorithms.
The ultimate goal is translating these models to naturalistic cognitive tasks - uncovering when and how inner speech spontaneously emerges during authentic problem-solving, social reasoning, and self-regulation. This research bridges cognitive psychology, computational neuroscience, and machine learning, offering unprecedented insights into the hidden voice that shapes human consciousness.
Supervisor: Bo Yao
Contact: b.yao1@lancaster.ac.uk
This PhD project will investigate how the bi-/multilingual language experience shapes multisensory processing. Whilst recent progress means that multilingualism is increasingly recognised as a diverse and dynamic experience (Rothman et al., 2023), we still know relatively little about how individual variation in language experience relates to differences in how the brain interprets and integrates information across the senses.
The project aims to determine the impact of multilingualism on multisensory processing, with a particular focus on the auditory and visual systems. The research could examine cortical processing across different levels of the hierarchy, from low-level sensory features to higher-order linguistic and social cues. Depending on the student’s goals, participants of interest may include individuals who are 'unimodal bi-/multilingual' (use multiple spoken languages) and 'bimodal bi-/multilingual' (use spoken and signed languages and are deaf or hearing). This would provide an opportunity to investigate modality-specific and modality-independent effects of language experience on sensory processing and plasticity.
The project has scope to use a range of methods including behavioural measures, eye-tracking, EEG and fNIRS (as used by Anderson et al., 2017, 2022). There is scope to explore a range of advanced analytic approaches including cortical source localisation, graph theory and functional connectivity. The student will join an interdisciplinary supervisory team with expertise in sensory-cognitive neuroscience and linguistics, and engage with research communities across deafness, cognition, sensory neuroplasticity, speech perception, and multilingualism.
Supervisors: Dr Carly Anderson, Professor Jason Rothman (School of Social Sciences) and Dr Helen Nuttall
Contact: c.anderson11@lancaster.ac.uk
Individuals with neurodegenerative disorders (Polden & Crawford, 2022) or psychiatric conditions (Smith & Crawford, 2022) often show pronounced and consistent impairments in inhibitory control on the antisaccade task. However, the specific sensorimotor and cognitive mechanisms underlying these deficits remain poorly understood. One influential explanatory framework is the Race Model (Crawford et al., 2011), which proposes that the first neural unit to reach threshold initiates a rapid, reflexive movement. These quickly activated units increase the likelihood of short-latency saccades, potentially including express saccades. As a consequence, increasing the probability of fast action responses should reduce procrastination and accelerate saccade initiation. While this facilitates prosaccades, it simultaneously increases the occurrence of erroneous rapid saccades toward the target during antisaccade trials.
Because correct antisaccades require both inhibition of the reflexive error response and additional processing time to generate the appropriate voluntary saccade, fast acting processes tend to undermine correct performance, whereas slower attentional operations support it. It is well established that the gap paradigm enhances fast attention release (FAR) and speeds saccade generation in both healthy and clinical groups—presumably due to early disengagement of attention from central fixation (Crawford et al., 2015). In contrast, the overlap paradigm promotes slower attention release (SAR), resulting in longer saccadic reaction times. Demonstrating these effects within the same individuals would offer a strong test of the Race Model.
This PhD project will conduct a detailed experimental assessment of the Race Model and compare its predictions with those derived from working-memory-based alternatives.
Supervisors: Trevor Crawford and Thom Wilcockson (Loughborough University)
Contact: t.crawford@lancaster.ac.uk
Subjective Cognitive Decline (SCD) represents a critical, pre-clinical stage for dementia progression, yet lacks objective, accessible biomarkers.
The global health challenge posed by Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias necessitates effective preclinical detection in order for early intervention to be effective. The clinical consensus now recognises a continuum of decline, starting decades before the onset of overt dementia. Within this continuum, the stage of Subjective Cognitive Decline (SCD) has emerged as the most critical and challenging demographic. Identifying the specific individuals within this large group who are at an increased and imminent risk of progressing to MCI and AD is essential for enabling very early, targeted interventions before significant irreversible neuropathological damage has occurred. Individuals reporting persistent, subjective concerns are significantly more likely to progress to Mild Cognitive Impairment, and eventually to clinically diagnosed AD, compared to their peers.
Traditional methods rely heavily on declarative memory impairment, but literature strongly suggests that the earliest cognitive deficits in pre-clinical AD pathology manifest not in classical memory function, but in executive particularly those functions reliant on the frontal and pre-frontal cortices.
Building on our recent evidence linking SCD to impaired inhibitory control of saccadic eye movements this project will conduct research study to validate this metric as a predictor of conversion to objective cognitive decline. Moreover, the work will employ participants with and without specific cognitive impairment (e.g.) spatial and verbal working memory to evaluate models of executive control by employing single case methodology to probe selective dissociations of cognitive operations (Crawford and Higham, 2016).
Supervisors: Trevor Crawford and Thom Wilcockson (Loughborough University)
Contact: t.crawford@lancaster.ac.uk
Visual expertise is an important area of study because it reveals how the human brain learns to recognise, interpret, and respond to complex visual information with speed and accuracy. Understanding how people develop specialised perceptual skills for example in medical image interpretation, provides key insights into the mechanisms of learning, attention, and neural plasticity.
Clinical radiologists are a group with highly developed visual expertise, trained extensively in detecting and interpreting pathology in medical images. Our recent work (Wincza et al., 2025) demonstrates that this expertise can even influence the perception of visual illusions. Such expertise groups therefore provide a valuable opportunity to examine how visual expertise affects executive functions within the visual domain, as well as patterns of eye-movement control and scanning behaviour.
Radiologists and reporting radiographers are an interesting example of where training affects the character of visual search, where overt attention changes with experience and an appropriate bias is developed which ignores irrelevant part of the image and focuses on any pathology. This efficient and rapid search is a marker of expertise, which is currently being challenged by the introduction of artificial intelligence into the reporting workflow. Research in visual expertise not only deepens our understanding of fundamental cognitive processes but also has practical implications, informing the design of training programmes, enhancing diagnostic accuracy, improving human–technology interaction, and guiding interventions for individuals with perceptual or attentional difficulties.
Supervisors: Trevor Crawford and Thom Wilcockson (Loughborough University)
Contact: t.crawford@lancaster.ac.uk
Lying convincingly can be a difficult task. We know that people who are credible liars are also better at other cognitive tasks that require mental flexibility, such as episodic future thinking (O’Connell et al., 2022) and counterfactual thinking (Briazu et al., 2017). We also know that working memory is associated with both lying and lie detection (Maldonado et al., 2018). However, we know very little about other cognitive skills that people rely on to tell lies successfully. This PhD would study one or more cognitive skills that may contribute to successful lying. The skills that are studied could include: working and autobiographical memory, mental time travel, inhibition, task switching, language proficiency, emotion recognition, and/or visual imagination. How many and which skills are studied will be decided by the applicant in collaboration with the supervisors as the proposal is developed. We welcome ideas from the applicant. The aim of the PhD would be to find associations between different skills and to attempt to establish which skills are most important for successful lying. The PhD would consist of several studies, which could each be centred on a different skill or could combine the study of different skills in different ways. Regardless of the skills that are included in the PhD, there will be studies looking at lie generation and at lie detection.
Supervisor: Dr Lara Warmelink
Contact: l.warmelink@lancaster.ac.uk
Transitions toward plant-based and vegan diets are increasingly recognised as essential for a sustainable future, offering substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, and land use associated with animal agriculture. Such dietary shifts represent an important societal response to the climate crisis and to broader environmental pressures. However, progress toward widespread adoption of vegan diets is significantly hindered by the spread of anti-vegan misinformation—misleading narratives that undermine public confidence in the health, environmental, and ethical viability of veganism. This PhD project will examine the structure and influence of these misinformation discourses and how to counter them. First, we will determine the nature, number, and relative prevalence of anti-vegan discourses by analysing a large corpus of blog posts, opinion pieces, social media messages, and other online content, using computational and qualitative methods to identify recurring themes and narrative patterns. Second, we will assess how persuasive these discourses are, and how strongly they shape beliefs about vegan diets and intentions to adopt them, through a series of controlled survey studies. Third—and critically—we will develop and empirically test innovative interventions for countering anti-vegan misinformation, drawing on theory-driven refutation techniques that provide accurate information while explaining why misleading claims are flawed. Through a rigorous programme of experimental research, the project aims to advance scientific understanding of misinformation about sustainable diets and to generate evidence-based strategies for promoting informed public reasoning on issues of diet, health, and environmental responsibility.
Supervisor: Dr Mark Hurlstone and Dr Jared Piazza
Contact: m.hurlstone@lancaster.ac.uk
