About the Project
Healthy ageing is associated with changes in vision and cognition that can affect everyday activities such as reading. This PhD project will investigate how ageing affects the mental processes that allow people to recognise words, understand sentences, learn new vocabulary and allocate visual attention during reading, and how these changes are reflected in brain activity.
The project will compare younger adults aged 18-30 years with older adults aged 65 years and above. It will combine eye-tracking, which measures where and for how long people look while reading, with electroencephalography (EEG), which records electrical activity from the brain. Recording these measures at the same time will make it possible to examine how changes in visual attention, language processing and brain activity are related during reading.
The student will develop a programme of experimental research focusing on one of three related areas.
- The first will examine how healthy ageing affects language processing during reading, including word recognition, sentence comprehension and the use of meaning and context.
- The second will examine how working memory contributes to learning new vocabulary in younger and older adults.
- The third will examine how age-related changes in vision and attention affect eye movements during reading, including how efficiently readers obtain information from words before looking directly at them and how they adapt their reading behaviour as visual and cognitive abilities change.
The project will be based in the School of Psychology and Vision Sciences at the University of Leicester. The student will receive training in experimental design, eye-tracking, EEG, combined eye-tracking and EEG recording, and statistical analysis in R, including mixed-effects models. They will also be supported in presenting their research at conferences and publishing the findings.
Techniques that will be undertaken during the project
- High-precision eye-tracking
- Electroencephalography (EEG)
- Co-registration of eye movements and EEG
- Linear mixed-effects modelling in R
- Bayesian statistical methods
Enquiries
Project Enquiries to appc1@leicester.ac.uk
Programme enquiries to mibtp-admin@leicester.ac.uk
To apply please refer to
https://le.ac.uk/study/research-degrees/funded-opportunities/bbsrc-mibtp
Funding Notes
All MIBTP students will be provided with a 4 year studentship. This includes: Tuition fees at the UK fee rate*, a tax free stipend which for 2026/7 is £21,805 per year (2027/8 stipend to be confirmed), a travel allowance over years 1-3, a travel/conference budget, a generous consumables budget, use of a laptop for the duration of the programme. The University of Leicester will provide full overseas fee waivers for the duration of their study to all international students accepted at Leicester. The funder, UKRI, allows us to appoint up to 30% overseas students.