I am delighted to be undertaking a Discovering Research Internship within the School of Psychology at the University of Aberdeen. Over the course of my degree, my interest in psychology has increasingly grown towards cognitive neuroscience, particularly related to language processing and memory. As I have engaged with different areas of psychology over the course of my degree, I have become especially interested in how language is encoded and represented in memory, and how behavioural and neuroscience methods can be combined to study these processes.
This internship will enable me to work on a cognitive neuroscience project examining the production effect, a well-known finding that information is remembered more accurately when it is actively produced aloud compared to when it is silently read. The project will investigate whether this effect is linked to activity in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), a brain region involved in speech production and language processing. I will use a form of brain stimulation known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to temporarily modulate neural activity within the IFG and examine its effects on production-based memory. What I find particularly compelling is the opportunity to connect a reliable behavioural memory effect with a specific neural mechanism, and to learn how this relationship can be investigated experimentally.
Through this internship, I aim to gain more expertise in cognitive neuroscience theory and methods, particularly in relation to language and memory, and to develop confidence in designing my own experiments and collecting data within a laboratory setting. A key part of this will be working with TMS, which will include learning how to operate and administer neurostimulation and using a technique called neuronavigation to stimulate specific coordinates within the cortex. I will also gain more familiarity with how experimental paradigms are implemented in practice. More broadly, I hope to develop a clearer understanding of how cognitive neuroscience research is conducted – from design through to interpretation. I will be working within a collaborative research environment with my supervisor, Dr Brian Mathias, and PhD researcher Lihui Hu.
I would like to express my gratitude to the Development Trust for funding this internship, as well as to the School of Psychology for providing me with the opportunity to contribute to this research. I’m looking forward to an exciting summer!
