Professor Patric Bach

Professor Patric Bach
Professor Patric Bach
Professor Patric Bach

Chair in Psychology

About
Email Address
patric.bach@abdn.ac.uk
Office Address
S02 William Guild Building
Old Aberdeen Campus
110 St. Machar Drive
AB24 2UB

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School/Department
School of Psychology
Research

Research Overview

My lab investigates how people plan their own actions and understand those of others. In particular, I investigate how prior expectations influence how we perceive and understand others' actions, how people are able to mentally rotate into the perspective of other people, and how people are able to control their intentional actions.

Research Areas

Psychology

Supervising

Research Specialisms

  • Psychology
  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Research Methods in Psychology

Our research specialisms are based on the Higher Education Classification of Subjects (HECoS) which is HESA open data, published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

Current Research

I have been awarded £462.995 from the Leverhulme Trust to study how prior expectations about other people shape how we experience their actions, and how their actions in turn changes how we see these people. To do so, we rely on behavioral as well as neuroimaging methods (EEG/fMRI).

In addition, we are currently completing a small grant from the Experimental Psychology Society (EPS) on the mechanisms underlying visual perspective taking, and two SGSSS-funded PhD projects on Human-Robot-Interaction and deep learning models of human social perception.

Funding and Grants

2020 – 2026. Leverhulme Trust. Social perception as Bayesian hypothesis testing and revision. £462,995.

2023 – 2027. Resolving how prior expectations shape the perception of other people’s behaviour with deep learning networks. SGSSS/ESRC-funded PhD studentship through the Advanced Quantitative Methods competition (with Dr Georgios Leontidis).

2022 – 2023. EPS. Underlying Mechanisms of Visual Perspective taking. £9,380 (with Dr Katrina McDonough)

2021 – 2025. Number 5 is alive! Attribution of knowledge and intention in human-robot interactions. Hauptantragsteller. SGSSS/ESRC-funded PhD studentship through the Interdisciplinary competition (with Dr Elena Giannaccini). £60,388/€68,745.

2013 – 2016. Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). One step ahead: Prediction of other people's behaviour in healthy and autistic individuals. £270,569.

2014 – 2015.  British Academy/Leverhulme Trust. Only the winning moves: How causality shapes automatic imitation in children. £9.715.

2016 – 2017. Alzheimer Research UK. The Alzheimer’s Research UK South West (ARUKSW) Brain-image database. Co-investigator (with Dr. Matt Roser). £5.000.

2014 – 2016. South West Alzheimer/Dementia Network. Normal ageing and the precursors of dementia investigated using brain imaging. Co-investigator (with Dr. Matt Roser). £2.800.

Teaching