Potential PhD topics

Our work basically follows two strands: 1) small-scale behavioural and neuroimaging experiments on the cognitive neuroscience of human episodic memory, 2) large-scale analysis of existing neuroimaging datasets on healthy ageing (eg CamCAN) and dementia.

To hear a high-level overview about our recent work on memory (July 2023), you could watch this video (note some familiarity with cognitive neuroscience of memory is assumed).

To hear an overview about our work on healthy ageing using the CamCAN cohort (Jan 2021), you could watch this video.

Some more specific suggestions are below, but note that the list below is not exhaustive; i.e, if you have a topic in mind that overlaps with my general interests (e.g. relating to above two talks), please do email to discuss!

1. Exploration of the effect of schema and prediction error on new learning, e.g. testing the SLIMM model (van Kesteren et al., 2012) or PIMMS framework (Henson & Gagnepain, 2010).

2. Further development of neural models of simple repetition effects (e.g., priming) as measured with fMRI and MEG/EEG (Alink et al, 2018) - see for example this talk.

3. Behavioural, fMRI and/or M/EEG experiments on the effect of healthy ageing on memory and cognition, as part of our large, collaborative Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN), particularly multivariate methods for integration of behavioural and neuroimaging data (Henson et al., 2016).

4. Investigation of MEG and simple memory paradigms for early detection of dementia, particularly using machine learning classification methods, as in (Vaghari et al, 2021), summarised in this video.

5. Further methodological development of analysis of MEG/EEG data, particularly in relation to Bayesian methods for multimodal integration (Henson et al., 2011), as in this talk.