The Department

Founded in 1952, the Department of Psychology is consistently ranked as one of the very best in the UK with an outstanding reputation for excellence in teaching, research and currently the department's research falls within four groupings: Developmental Science; Learning, Memory and Cognition, Perception, Action and Awareness; Quantitative Social Psychology. The department is extremely well-equipped for research, including facilities for fMRI, TMS, tDCS, EEG/ERP, VR, eye movement tracking, and biophysiological recording. The department also has a motion capture lab for analysis of visuomotor action and experiments in immersive virtual reality, as well as setups for psychophysics including an echo-attenuated chamber. The department benefits from full IT and mechanical research support from departmental technicians.

The Role

A 24-month fixed-term full time Research Assistant (RA) position is available at the Department of Psychology at Durham University. The successful candidate will join the research project NewSense led by Prof Marko Nardini and funded by the European Research Council. The project is studying people's abilities to learn to use new sensory signals to augment their perceptual and motor skills. For example, people will be trained to use new auditory or vibro-tactile cues to judge where objects are in space or what material they are made from. The work has applications to improving perception in people with sensory deficits, as well as to expanding the limits of perceptual experience and abilities in healthy people.

The project uses a combination of behavioural testing, neuroimaging, and comparison of behavioural and neuroimaging data with the predictions of different mathematical models. The role of the RA is to work as part of a larger team, assisting with collecting behavioural and neuroimaging data, mainly with healthy adults. This will include scheduling and coordinating participants, including those in long and complex follow-up studies. The RA will also help to refine experimental designs during piloting, and assist with some of the initial analysing and summarising of data.

The post will provide excellent research experience and training, including opportunities to gain experience in preparing data for publication and presenting results at conferences. While these are not requirements of the post, they are available for a post-holder who is looking to gain this experience. The role does not require programming or mathematical modelling, but the post-holder can also gain some experience in these fields if they wish.