DEPARTMENTAL NEWSLETTER NO. 231

Monday 14 October 2002

CONGRATULATIONS

to Brian Butterworth on being awarded a Leverhulme Trust grant of £133,258 for his project, ‘Ideas of number in Aboriginal children with little experience of number words or counting’

to Brian Butterworth on being elected a Fellow of the British Academy

to Sarah Dace on her marriage. She’ll now be known as Sarah White

to Jason Dale and Steve Davis on being awarded their PhDs

to Patrick Haggard and Gabriella Vigliocco on being promoted to Reader; and to Janet Feigenbaum, Kate Jeffery, Helene Joffe and Keith Langley on being promoted to Senior Lecturer

to Patrick Haggard on being awarded an ESRC grant of £212,340 for his project, ‘Psychological mechanisms of interpersonal body representation’

to Celia Heyes and Alastair McClelland on jointly being awarded the Faculty of Life Sciences Teaching Award for 2002

to Kate Jeffery on the birth of a bouncing baby girl, Cicely

to Helene Joffe on being awarded a North Central Thames Primary Care Research Network grant of £9.968 for her project ‘Patients’ feelings and concerns about accessing and using internet-based health information as a resource for the doctor-patient consultation’

to Alan Johnston on being awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering grant of £25,000 for his project, ‘The time course of visual awareness’ which allows Derek Arnold to be a Postdoctoral Fellow here for a year

to Nilli Lavie and Muriele Brand on being awarded an EC Marie Curie Fellowship of 53,736 Euros for their project, ‘Perceptual Load in Reading’

to Francesco Pavani on the birth of a bouncing baby girl, Matilde

to Dino Petrides and Norah Frederickson on being awarded a Nuffield Foundation grant of £6,000 for their project, ‘Psychosocial influences on scholastic achievement and behaviour at school: A longitudinal study of adolescents’

to Phil Reed on being elected President of the European Association for Behaviour Analysis at its meeting in April

to Mick Rugg and Jeremie Mattout on being awarded an EC Marie Curie Fellowship of £66,162 for their project, ‘Quality of life and management of living resources’

to Tim Shallice on being awarded a Wellcome Trust grant of £250,006 for his project, ‘Reconciling imaging and neuropsychological studies of the control of memory processes’

to Paul Stenner on being awarded a Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Fellowship of £18,235 for his project, ‘Emotional dimensions of rights: formulating a systems theoretical framework’ Paul’s also been awarded a Humboldt Fellowship in order to work for one year in Frankfurt, Germany on the same project

BPS VISIT

we will be visit by the BPS on 6 November for an accreditation of our undergraduate degree programme. Please keep the day free in your diaries as you may be called upon at the last minute.

WELCOME

A warm welcome to:

Derek Arnold, Research Fellow with Alan Johnston,

Elizabeth Avitan, Research Assistant with CORE,

Ellen Boddington, Research Assistant with CORE,

Guillermo Botella, Marie Curie Fellow with Alan Johnston,

Muriele Brand, Marie Curie Fellow with Nilli Lavie,

Myriam Brunswic, Temporary Lecturer with UCLIC,

Ruediger Flach, Visitor with Patrick Haggard,

Zoe Fortune, Research Co-ordinator with Uta Frith,

Sam Gilbert, Research Fellow with Paulk Burgess,

Clare Humphrey, Research Assistant with CORE,

Noriko Iwasaki , Research Fellow with Gabriella Vigliocco,

Jordy Kaufman, Lecturer,

Dave Lagnado, Research Fellow with David Shanks,

Alex Lewis, Research Fellow with Zhaoping Li,

Juan Li, Royal Society Visiting Fellow with Mick Rugg,

Brigitte Lipschutz, Research Fellow with Jon Driver,

Delyth Lloyd, Research Fellow with Brian Butterworth,

Jeremie Mattout, Marie Curie Fellow with Mick Rugg,

Caroline Mockler, Research Fellow with Shelley Channon,

Lisa Monaghan, College Teacher in Clinical Health Psychology,

Chris Muller, Visitor with Alan Johnston,

Sukhvinder Obhi, College Teacher,

Debbie Osborne, Research Assistant with CORE,

Rebekah Pratt, College Teacher in Clinical Health Psychology,

Rebecca Rudge, Research Assistant with CORE,

Lucy Stirling, Research Assistant with CORE,

Volker Thoma, Research Fellow with Nilli Lavie,

Vincent Walsh, Royal Society Research Fellow,

Simon Watts, College Teacher.

DEPARTMENTAL SEMINARS

Tuesdays at 4.30 in room 305, 26 Bedford Way. Tea beforehand at 4.00 in the Common Room

15th October
Genetic testing: choice communication and consequences
Susan Michie (Psychology, UCL)

22nd October
Perceptual categories are culturally relative - Evidence from the New Guinea and New Cross
Debi Roberson (University of Essex)

29th October
What do people (and evolving connectionist networks) learn when they
learn to catch a ball?
Peter McLeod (Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University).

ICN SEMINARS

Mondays at 5.00 in the Seminar Room, ICN

14th October
Cathy Price (Wellcome Dept of Imaging Neuroscience, UCL)
Functional imaging studies of semantic retrieval.

21st October
John Wearden (Psychology Dept, Manchester University)
Time perception in humans: From explanations of behaviour to mysteries of the brain.

28th October
Chris Rorden (School of Psychology, University of Nottingham)
The neuropsychology of attention: evidence from neglect, extinction and Balint's syndrome.

4th November
Lisa Cipolotti (Dept of Neuropsychology, National Hospital)
Visual memory functions in semantic dementia: neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence.

RESEARCH INFORMATION

I have information on the following:

British Academy Readership & Senior Research Fellowships, http://www.britac.ac.uk, closing date 31 October

Grass Foundation Fellowships in neurobiological investigation, http://www.mbl.edu/labs/grassfdn, closing date 15 December

Leverhulme Fellowships, http://www.leverhulme.org.uk/research_fellowships.shtml, closing date 12 November

Leverhulme grants, http://www.leverhulme.org/research_project_grants.shtml, no closing date

Wellcome Trust research leave awards, http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/1/homgrarlf.html, closing date 1 December

A LOAD OF B******S

Finally, congratulations to Chris McManus on being awarded the 2002 Ig™ Nobel Prize for Medicine for his paper “Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and Ancient Sculptures” published in Nature. The IgNobels are run by the spoof science magazine Annals of Improbable Research and are obviously a spoof on the Nobel Prize. To quote the award, “The winners have all done things that first make people laugh and then make them think” and the gongs recognise achievements that “cannot, or should not, be reproduced”…

Chris’s award-winning paper, quoting Winckelmann’s observations in 1764, showed that ancient sculptures of men wrongly had a larger left testicle. However, as most of you know, in reality the reverse is the case as the left testicle may be lower but it ain’t larger. Chris collected his plum prize at a recent ceremony in Harvard…unfortunately the more appropriate Albert Hall was full at the time.

An account of the awards can be found on the web at: http://www.improbable.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig2002. Luckily we don’t have any photographic evidence of Chris undertaking his research although a photo of the award can be seen down below:

Proof if ever it was needed that Chris does actually talk a load…you know the rest…