External Research Studies

The effect of age and on own-race bias on face recognition

The purpose of this study: Previous research suggests that face recognition ability deteriorates with age (Firestone, Tuk-Browne & Podd, 2005; Salthouse, 2004). Furthermore, it's believed that faces of people of the different race as the subject tend to be recognised worse than faces of people from the same races. This phenomenon is known as the 'other-race' effect in the literature (eg Bothwell et al., 1989; Shepherd et al ., 1974). I would like explore the effect of age on face recognition as well as the effect of own-race bias on face recognition. Furthermore, I would like to investigate whether age (younger, older) interacts with the observed level of own-race bias (own race, other race). This last issue has not been explored in the literature, but is of considerable theoretical and sociological interest to understand how own race bias operates across age groups in a multicultural society like Great Britain compared to a relatively unicultural society like Poland.

What does the study involve? If you take part in this study, you will be asked to complete a short questionnaire about your age, gender, occupation and nationality. After that you will be asked to participate in the face recognition task. First you will be presented with 60 faces ('learning' phase). Each face will be displayed for 4 seconds. Immediately after, the second 'recognition' phase will start. In the 'recognition' phase you will be presented with all the 60 faces that had been demonstrated to you in the 'learning' phase, additionally, you will be presented with 60 new faces you had not been shown in the 'learning' phase. Each face will be displayed for 4 seconds. For each face you will have to respond whether you have seen the face before, marking 'X; in the YES section or 'X' in the NO section in the table provided. Furthermore, you will be asked to complete a non-verbal intelligence test (The Cattell Intelligence Culture Fair Test). However your score will not be linked with measuring your IQ.

The exclusion criteria. Since the present study aims to test ability to recognise faces among white participants other subjects whose race is not white will not be able to participate in this research.

If you want to gain further information regarding the study contact the researchers. Email: katarzyna.niemkiewicz@student.anglia.ac.uk or telephone 07588 751695.

Help Research on How the Brain Works

The Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit is an internationally renowned centre for research on the workings of the human mind and brain.  Our work is dependent upon members of the public who volunteer to take part in our studies. 
We are looking for a wide range of people, of all ages, to be part of our participation panel, you should be able to read and write well in English and be in good health, with no history of neurological injury, or currently on any psychiatric medication.  For some of our tests you should not have any pieces of metal in your body.
Typically, our experiments involve simple, computer-based tests of vision, hearing, memory or language.  Additionally, there are three main techniques that we use to record brain responses: Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and Electroencephalography (EEG).  All techniques are completely safe and non-invasive; they involve no needles, drugs, radiation or x-rays.
We will pay you £6.00 per hour for computer-based tests.  For MRI you will be paid £10 per hour with a minimum payment of £20, plus a photograph of your brain and for MEG / EEG you will receive £10.00 per hour.  You will also be given a contribution of up to £3.00 towards travel expenses. To register your interest in volunteering and to read more about our work please visit our online form at https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/panel/form. Alternatively, you can contact the Panel Manager at: Panel Manager, MRC-CBU, 15 Chaucer Road, FREEPOST, CB1 152, Cambridge. Tel: 01223 505610. Email: panel.manager@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk

Brain activations

Would you be willing to take part in a research study exploring brain activations? The procedure involves an MRI scan of your brain lasting about 90 minutes. It would take place at Addenbrooke's hospital. The study looks into how stroke patients recover after stroke, BUT we NEED HEALTHY VOLUNTEERS (over the ages of 55) for comparison. You will be reimbursed for your time and trouble. If you would like to know more about the study, and think you would be willing to help, please contact Euphrasia Ngum on 01223 217695 Email ekn23@cam.ac.uk, or Emmanuel Carrera on 01223 274430 Email ec417@cam.ac.uk.

Nerve Study
Healthy volunteers, between the ages of 55 and 75 with no serious medical problems, are needed for a study investigating the presence of a chemical that accumulates in the brain and may be responsible for injuring nerve cells.  The study takes place at Addenbrooke’s Hospital.  Participants will have two scans, an MRI scan and a PET scan and be reimbursed for participation and travel expenses. 
If you would like to know more about the study please contact: Euphrasia Ngum on 01223 217695.  R3 Neurosciences, Box 83, Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 2QQ. Email: ekn23@cam.ac.uk

Language Research
The Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain at the University of Cambridge are looking for people aged 18-90yrs to join a panel of volunteers.  You will be asked to complete some simple language experiments at the offices and then you may be invited to have an MRI or a MEG brain scan at the MRC unit on Chaucer Road, Cambridge.
You should be right-handed, a native speaker of British English, have no metal in your body (dental fillings and crowns are fine) and should not be claustrophobic. Also very interested in hearing from people who fit these criteria and who had a stroke at least 6 months ago. You will be compensated for your time and get to keep a picture of your brain!
For further information please contact Mrs Marie Dixon at the Dept. of Experimental Psychology, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, Tel: 01223 766458 or email: research@csl.psychol.cam.ac.uk

Listening experiment
I am looking for older adults interested in participating in a listening experiment. The experiment consists of three parts: a short vocabulary test, a short hearing test and a short listening task. Together, these tasks will not take longer than 30 min to complete. The study is set up in the Linguistics Department of the University of Cambridge. I am particularly looking for native speakers of British English who are 60 years and older and whose hearing is still good enough so that they do not need to wear a hearing aid. I am happy to welcome back anyone who already volunteered for last year’s study on “r” target words. There is a small compensation of £4.50 for your participation. If you are interested, please send an email to ah540@cam.ac.uk or call 760822.

You may be interested in the results from a previous Hearing Study

Some of you will remember coming to the Linguistics Department at Cambridge University last year to participate in a hearing study. In the course of the testing session, I first measured your ability to hear tones of different frequencies, and then asked you to listen to sentences and write down what you heard. With the help of those sentences I measured how well you could understand target words that contained an “r” depending on whether or not the first half of the sentence contained acoustic cues congruent with an upcoming “r”. The results are now in and I thought you might like a quick summary of the results. I did indeed find that the subtle cues in the first half of the sentence made it easier for listeners to later perceive the “r”-word. Moreover, these same cues made it less likely for listeners to correctly hear “non-r” target words when they were present but not followed by a word with the letter “r”. This result pattern was particularly true for listeners with very good hearing in high frequencies. As high-frequency hearing worsened, listeners were less likely to hear those subtle “r” cues, and having them in the beginning of the sentence did neither help nor hinder word perception. Much to our fascination, listeners with hearing loss in the high frequencies started to use other information to aid perception, particularly information on word frequency. Hence, when in doubt of the correct word, they would choose that word, which is most common to the English language. These results are interesting because they show not only that listeners change their listening strategies to accommodate changes in hearing, but also how listening strategies can be adjusted. Moreover, we would like to argue that having to rely on knowledge (of word frequency for instance) rather than the acoustic information inherent in the signal (signified by our subtle manipulation at the beginning of each sentence) is more effortful and tiring over the course of a long conversation, and that this might be one of the reasons why listening in noise becomes more exhausting as we age. Many thanks to everyone who agreed to participate in the study!