The research is currently organised under four umbrella groupings:

• Evolution and Development
  Staff in this research group study the evolution and development of motor, behavioural and cognitive processes, including language, social cognition and conflict management, vision, attention and memory. Further research foci are child safety, development of trust, social tactics, perspective taking, individual differences, atypical development, spatial language, handedness and decision making.

  Members of this research group work with children, adults, non-human primates and other animals (e.g. dogs).

  We use a range of interdisciplinary approaches and our methods include Intermodal Preferential Looking, Preferential Listening, Habituation, Infant and Child Eye-tracking, Infant & Adult EEG, Motion Analysis as well as Safety Education Training, Acting-Out and Elicitation methods, Interviews, Assessments and Observation techniques as well as Response Time Measures.

• Forensic and Clinical Psychology Research
  concerned with aspects of psychological functioning related to clinical and forensic problems. Most of the research is focused in applied settings and on clinical or forensic populations. This includes studying individuals in the community, special groups in hospital or clinical settings, as well as offenders both in and out of institutions. Research undertaken concerns staff, the environmental context or the individual, using a range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

• Identity and Psychologies
  focusing on social and discursive constructions of identities, in particular, emerging adulthood, pregnancy and motherhood, ageing; in addition staff are interested in the effects of environment and physical changes on public perception of risk; the role of the environment in ageing identity; and constructions of terrorism. Members of the group have differing backgrounds in psychology, e.g. developmental, social, critical; they use primarily qualitative methods, but their research is not focused on a single approach.

• Perception, Action and Cognition
  focusing on the structures and processes underlying visual perception and attention. Past research has included, for example, comparative face perception, inhibition of return and neuropsychological conditions such as Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy. Other cognitively oriented work concerns linguistic structures and language processing, the impact of emotion on memory and social cognition.