Paul Hoffman
Reader

- Psychology
- School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
Contact details
- Tel: 0131 650 4654
- Email: p.hoffman@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Room S9, Psychology Building
- City
- 7 George Square, Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9JZ
Availability
Please send me an email if you'd like to arrange a meeting with me: p.hoffman@ed.ac.uk
Background
I completed a PhD in Cognitive Neuropsychology at the University of Manchester in 2008 and subsequently worked as a research fellow in the University's Neuroscience and Aphasia Research Unit. In 2013, I took up a six-month Visiting Scholar position at Stanford University before returning briefly to Manchester. In this year, I was also awarded the BNS Elizabeth Warrington Prize for outstanding early-career research.
In 2014, I came to Edinburgh as a Research Fellow in the Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology and I am now a lecturer in Cognitive Psychology. I have recently served as Meetings Secretary of the British Neuropsychological Society and co-edited a special issue of the journal Neuropsychologia on the topic of semantic cognition.
A full list of my publications is available on my Google scholar page.
Undergraduate teaching
I teach on courses relating to memory and cognitive neuroscience
Postgraduate teaching
I currently teach on the following courses: Brain Imaging in Cognitive Neuroscience and Specialist Techniques in Psychological Research
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Current PhD students supervised
Past PhD students supervised
Grace Rice - Using neuroimaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation to probe conceptual knowledge in the right and left anterior temporal lobes, University of Manchester, 2012-2016 (co-supervised with Prof. Matt Lambon Ralph)
Research summary
My research is concerned with the processes of semantic cognition – i.e., the ways in which we (a) maintain a store of conceptual knowledge about objects, words and people and (b) use executive control processes to access this information in a flexible, task-appropriate manner. I explore this using a variety of techniques, including:
- Case-series neuropsychological investigations, primarily of patients with semantic dementia and semantic deficits following stroke
- Computational linguistic analyses (e.g., latent semantic analysis)
- Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation in healthy subjects
- Functional neuroimaging studies
- Connectionist computational models
I am also interested in the ways in which semantic knowledge interacts with other cognitive and linguistic processes.
-
Taxonomic and thematic relations rely on different types of semantic features: Evidence from an fMRI meta-analysis and a semantic priming study
In:
Brain and Language, vol. 242
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2023.105287
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print) -
The words that little by little revealed everything: Neural response to lexical-semantic content during narrative comprehension
In:
NeuroImage, vol. 276
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.120204
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print) -
Damage to temporoparietal cortex is sufficient for impaired semantic control
In:
Cortex, vol. 156, pp. 71-85
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2022.05.022
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Representation of motion concepts in occipitotemporal cortex: fMRI activation, decoding and connectivity analyses
In:
NeuroImage, vol. 259
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119450
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Modulation of brain activity by psycholinguistic information during naturalistic speech comprehension and production
In:
Cortex, vol. 155, pp. 287-306
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2022.08.002
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
What determines cognitive estimation ability? Changing contributions of semantic and executive domains as a function of age
In:
Journal of Neuropsychology, vol. 16, pp. 481-497
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/jnp.12279
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Collaborative learning in older age: a systematic review
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Poster (Unpublished) -
Validated measures of semantic knowledge and semantic control: Normative data from young and older adults for more than 300 semantic judgements
In:
Royal Society Open Science, vol. 9, pp. 1-19
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.211056
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Similar neural networks respond to coherence during comprehension and production of discourse
In:
Cerebral Cortex, vol. 32, pp. 4317–4330
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhab485
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print) -
The cognitive and neural underpinnings of discourse coherence in post-stroke aphasia
(12 pages)
In:
Brain Communications, vol. 4
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcac147
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)