Dr Elaine Niven

I have an over-arching interest in how we mentally represent the world around us; how we store, manipulate, update and retrieve that information – often apparently seamlessly – and how this changes with age, and with situation – for example, with reduced resources to process incoming information. My research and supervision topics include the often closely associated areas of autobiographical memory, event representation, visuo-spatial working memory, working memory capacity, memory and ageing, and multitasking, with a particular interest in conducting research relating to how memory operates ‘in the real world’.

For Level 4 students - illustrative dissertations I have advised or supervised:

Over the past few years there has been a lot of media attention, as well as research, about the impact of smartphones on our day-to-day lives. Much media attention has focussed on potential consequences of ’thoughtless use’ of devices that appear to otherwise provide so much. How does the research compare to the hype? A range of dissertations have looked at related topics:

• Does taking photographs impair our memory for what we are recording? In a replication and extension study of the work of Henkel (2014) we looked at the apparently negative consequences to memory of taking pictures of objects, and the possibly positive effect of zooming-in when doing so.
• There is evidence to suggest that while we may well forget something that we have ‘off-loaded’ (for example, written down), or purposely tried to forget, there may also be unintended positive consequences - such as being better able to remember a following piece of information. Following Storm and Stone (2014), a dissertation study sought to test whether observed effects extend to remembering and forgetting pictures.
• While monitoring your dinner as it cooks, you pick up up your phone and continue reading a paper that you started earlier, before pausing to answer the latest in a long line of texts in a group chat that’s trying to arrange your next holiday trip. You might feel a sense of achievement at being ‘time-efficient’ - but are we doing ourselves a disservice when we attempt to multi-task? A dissertation looked at the consequences (positive and/or negative) of different types of multi-tasking.

Investigating the boundaries of episodic memories: when we recall an event from our lives - a particular journey to a given location, a specific friend’s birthday celebration last month, yesterday’s family dinner, and so on -  we can break that event down into smaller and smaller components; what patterns can be found in the way we do this, and how do these differ across different types of event? Do these components, or the structure of these components, change over time? 

• A final year undergraduate dissertation sought to test the generalisability and stability of a previously derived structure to the boundaries of episodic memories. 

• Level 1 Introductory Psychology 1 - Memory & Cognition; Introductory Psychology 2 - Attention, Learning, Memory
• Level 2 Biological Psychology; Ageing
• Level 3 Biological Psychology (module coordinator); Research Skills 3a - Practical 1
• Level 4 Dissertation supervisor
• MSc Practicum and/or dissertation supervisor 
• Undergraduate Learning and Teaching, Quality and Academic Standards lead for Psychology