Your Postgraduate Psychology Offer Holder Hub

My name is Kerr, I'm studying an MSC here at the School of Psychology. It's great here, we get all sorts of different devices, such as this haptic device, Oculus and VR, and my current project looks at the effect of an intention tremor on handover between a human and a robot, which is a type of tremor that as you go to pick up an object, for example, it increases in amplitude. And we're going to look at how humans deal with this tremor the hope that we can then apply it to a robot model, for example, these robots would be homecare robots or assistive devices. They will be in and around households in the future to help the elderly perform everyday tasks. What you see here behind me is the MEG system this system allows us to measure the ongoing brain activity from individuals performing different kind of cognitive tasks. It's made from three hundred sensors that can measure every small magnetic fields outside the head so that allows us to infer what sort of brain activity is going on inside the head while individuals are performing different kind of cognitive tasks. We have a new 3 Tesla Siemens Prisma MRI scanner and we have the number of different EEG systems that can be used to measure the electrical brain activity and they're available for postgraduate students. Sometimes we've had undergraduate students using them. We have a near infrared spectroscopy system, which is one of only two in the world, I think. It's a lot more detailed than many other systems and what we're trying to do with that system is to develop similar kinds of approaches that you can use with functional MRI but without the need to put someone into the MRI scanner, which can sometimes be a bit daunting and a bit difficult depending on your research question. So one of the big advantages of the Centre for Human Brain Health is that we have different kind of tools under the same roof that means that for instance the MEG, that technique we can integrate with other techniques, that being MRI and TMS and other different kinds of recording modalities. Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation or TMS is a way of stimulating the human brain. It uses very powerful magnets to induce electrical currents in the brain and these currents can both stimulate the brain or, with certain protocols, inhibit the brains activity so we can experimentally test the effect of manipulating the brain and looking at behavioural changes, in this case visual attention. All these techniques have different advantages and disadvantages so by using them together we can get the optimal information from the working brain. Within the Posture and Balance Lab we look at human movement control in a range of different healthy and clinical populations and we do that by using a range of facilities and equipment such as force transducers, force platforms and motion capture systems. With the motion capture system we can look at whole body motion in three dimensions or even more discrete movements such as moving the finger across a surface. I've just completed my postgraduate degree here at the University in the School of Psychology and I'm now working as a research assistant at the University of Birmingham. We're working with textures and aging trying to see how different age groups perceive different textures and the different forces they produce. So we use a force plate to basically measure how many Newtons people can feel textures with and what they think that texture feels like, whether it's rough or smooth. Really what we want to be able to do is have as many people using those systems for as many different questions as possible.