Dr Elliot Freeman

Overview

Dr Freeman's doctoral training was at Bristol University, under the supervision of Tom Troscianko, where in 1998 he gained a PhD in Psychology. He then worked as a postdoctoral research fellow with Jon Driver, in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, until 2007.

During that period he travelled to the Weizmann Institute to work with Dov Sagi in Israel, and to the Smith-Kettlewell Institute in San Francisco to work with Preeti Verghese. He was also a visiting fellow at Salk Institute in San Diego, in Geoff Boynton's laboratory.

After his postdoctoral training, he took a lectureship at the Psychology Department at Brunel University, before moving to his present post here at City University London in 2009.

Qualifications

• PhD Psychology, University of Bristol, United Kingdom
• PGCert Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, United Kingdom
• BSc (Hons) Psychology, Cardiff University, United Kingdom

Memberships of professional organisations

• British Association of Cognitive Neuroscience
• Applied Vision Association
• Higher Education Academy

Teaching

BSc Psychology

PS2003 Cognitive psychology
PS3019 Topics in Cognitive Neuroscience

In his early research Dr Freeman developed a paradigm for investigating how attention and task demands can influence visual contour integration, a fundamental process by which the visual brain integrates its fragmentary input into global forms. His theme has since broadened to studying how the brain resolves the interpretation of ambiguous stimuli, according to the context in which they are encountered. He has found that such context interactions can be gated (effectively switched on or off) by voluntary goal-directed attention, sometimes with dramatic consequences for subjective awareness.

More recently Dr Freeman has been studying contextual interactions between different modalities, such as vision and hearing. For example, he has discovered that the pure timing of auditory events can influence the perceived direction of ambiguous visual apparent motion. He has also been involved in collaborations on numerical cognition, for example examining interactions between the processing of time, number and space.

His current research adopts an individual differences approach, focusing on how people differ in their ability to put sight and sound together. For example, some people lip-read better when lip-movements are slightly delayed relative to voices, while others benefit from a slight auditory delay.

His methods are primarily behavioural (psychophysics), but he has also worked on projects involving functional and anatomical fMRI, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and EEG. He is also beginning to experiment with transcranial electrical stimulation.

He is happy to supervise student projects on attention, vision and crossmodal (e.g. audiovisual) integration.

Research students

Publications by category