Emily Thomas

PhD Student
Contact:
@emilyrthomas27 (twitter)
 
Supervisors:
Dr Clare Press - Birkbeck
Prof. Matthew Longo - Birkbeck
Prof. Floris de Lange - Radboud University
 
Research:
We need to perceive the sensory consequences of our actions fairly accurately in order to interact successfully with our environment, such that we can make corrective actions when we detect unexpected outcomes, e.g., when a cup of tea is lighter than we expect. However, our perception is never perfect due to ambiguities in our environment or high computational processing demands. One way in which we may increase the accuracy of our percepts is to use our learned knowledge about the world - expectations - to guide our interpretation of our senses. My PhD project is funded by the Leverhulme trust and is based on examining how expectation influences perception during action. I will investigate this predominantly for tactile and visual perception, using a range of psychophysics and neuroimaging methods.
 
Previous education:
PhD in Psychology 
Birkbeck, University of London
October 2017 to present
 
MSc in Brain and Cognition
Erasmus University Rotterdam
September 2015 - August 2016
 
BSc in Psychology
University of Lincoln
September 2012 - June 2015
 
Publications:
Thomas, E. R., Stötefalk, N., Pecher, D., & Zeelenberg, R. (2019). Alignment effects for pictured objects: Do instructions to “imagine picking up an object” prime actions? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 45(10), 1346–1354. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000676