Psychology
Profile
Background
I graduated from the University of Sussex with a BSc (Hons) Neuroscience in 2000. I worked as an IT engineer and trainer between then and 2007 when I began my PhD in psychology at the University of Exeter, under the supervision of Professor Tim Hodgson (now Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Lincoln). I began the PhD initially on a part-time basis, whilst working as an Associate Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. I continued my studies under an Exeter Graduate Fellowship and was awarded my PhD in September 2011.
Research
My PhD investigated how the eye movement system responds to directional cues, particularly those with social or biological relevance. I was particularly interested in how we process other people’s eye gaze direction, and how this differs from our responses to non-social cues such as words and arrows and whether such responses have any relationship to social abilities in everyday life. In addition, I examined whether damage to a particular area of the frontal lobes of the brain, the orbitofrontal cortex, can selectively disrupt the processing of eye gaze cues whilst leaving responding to non-social cues intact. The findings of my thesis suggest that this may indeed be the case.
My current research interests involve the development of more real-world, dynamic paradigms for studying attention to social cues (“social attention”) than those typically employed in the lab. In relation to this, I am also keen to extend the neuropsychological findings from my PhD with additional orbitofrontal patients.
Current role
Since April 2011, I have been working with Dr Ed Morrison in the Department of Psychology at the University of Portsmouth as a Research Associate on an ESRC-funded project entitled “The strategic modulation of dynamic aspects of attractiveness”.
Publications
Gregory, N.J. and Hodgson, T.L. Get right (or left) to the point: finger pointing influences saccade generation (under review), Visual Cognition.
Gregory, N.J. & Hodgson, T.L., (resubmitted), Giving participants the eye and showing them the finger: Socio-biological cues in the anti-saccade task, Perception.
Bate, S., Haslam, C., Hodgson T.L., Jansari A., Gregory, N.J., Kay, J. (2010) Positive and negative emotion enhances the processing of famous faces in a semantic judgment task. Neuropsychology. 24(1): 84-9.
Hodgson, T. L., Parris, B. A., Gregory, N. J., & Jarvis, T. (2009). The saccadic Stroop effect: Evidence for involuntary programming of eye movements by linguistic cues. Vision Research, 49(5), 569-574.
Conferences
Gregory, N.J. (2009), Effects of real-world arrow and eye gaze cues on oculomotor programming. Paper presented at the 15th European Conference on Eye Movements, University of Southampton, UK