Date: Thursday 3rd December
Time: 16:00 - 17:00
Location: Barn 2
Title: Attention to the Sense of Touch - Neural Correlates and Behavioural Evidence
Biography: Dr Jones is a lecturer at Middlesex University London. Before joining
the Psychology Department in 2013 he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at
the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Universite Paris Descartes. Prior
to Paris he worked as a visiting lecturer and research fellow in London (City
University, BPP). Jones has a BSc in Psychology (City University) and MSc in
Cognitive Neuropsychology (UCL). He received his PhD from City University
London, where he is now also an honorary research fellow.
Broadly, Dr Jones'
research interests include attention, action, and multisensory integration, and
using cognitive neuroscience techniques to investigate how the brain and
behaviour relate. Focus has been on exploring how we select and attend to
information constantly bombarding our senses. In particular how we process and
attend to the sense of touch. Of interest has also been to explore how we
process sensory information which is a consequence of our own actions (action
prediction). His research has appeared in journal such as NeuroImage,
Neuropsychologia, European Journal of
Neuroscience, Biological Psychology,
and Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience.
Abstract: The sense of touch is
imperative to cognition, development, and is implicated in how we perceive the
world around us and how we interact with others. The skin, enveloping our
bodies, is the largest human organ, and through sensory receptors it provides us
with a vast amount of information about our immediate environment. Yet,
compared to the domains of visual and auditory attention, relatively little
research has focused on the somatosensory system and the body sense. We are
constantly bombarded with a wealth of tactile information, such as from our
clothes or the chair we sit upon, and cannot process all of this information
simultaneously. Mechanisms of selective attention help to prioritize,
predict and select information relevant to the situation, and to guide our
behaviour appropriately. The research presented
in this talk explores the question of how we selectively focus our attention to
the sense of touch. Specifically, the talk will cover research on how top-down
tactile attention (e.g., thinking about your left foot) and bottom-up tactile
attention (e.g., a tap on the shoulder) is processed in the brain using
electroencephalogram (EEG).
Websites:
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/staff-directory/jones-alexander
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alexander_Jones3?ev=hdr_xprf
Andrew Christer from the BPS will be here to talk to students and answer any queries they have about becoming a psychologist. 
Fiona Starr has been offering expertise and
consultation to the BBC on a 6 part factual entertainment series about how
children see the world. She was asked to get involved with generating themes for each episode and scenarios that
the programme makers could create for the children, aged 5-10 years, to
encourage relevant, interesting and surprising behaviour. It was great fun and
also really interesting. The series is due to come out some time next year.
