The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has awarded three significant grants to the Department of Experimental Psychology.

Professor Klaus Oberauer will lead a project on memory with colleagues Dr Simon Farrell and Dr Chris Jarrold. The project, which has been awarded a grant of £673,892, will look at working memory, or the part of the cognitive system that is responsible for holding a small amount of information for processing.

The research will develop several models of working memory and run a series of experiments with young adults to test how our memory performs when processing short lists of items, like letters, at the same time as processing other information. It will examine why we forget information in the short term; whether interference is important and how exactly it works; and the role of rehearsal in maintaining information. The limited capacity of working memory is a key factor in determining our intellectual proficiency, including reading comprehension, reasoning ability, and academic success.

Elsewhere in the Department, Professor Iain Gilchrist has received a grant of £78,347 for his work on vision and Dr Liz Pellicano a grant of 75,566 for her research on children and autism.