Paul Hoffman
Lecturer

- 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.
-
Barking up the right tree: Univariate and multivariate fMRI analyses of homonym comprehension
In:
NeuroImage, vol. 219
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117050
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print) -
Going off the rails: Impaired coherence in the speech of patients with semantic control deficits
In:
Neuropsychologia, vol. 146
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107516
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print) -
Revealing the neural networks that extract conceptual gestalts from continuously evolving or changing semantic contexts
In:
NeuroImage, vol. 220
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116802
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print) -
Divergent effects of healthy ageing on semantic knowledge and control: Evidence from novel comparisons with semantically-impaired patients
In:
Journal of Neuropsychology, vol. 13, pp. 462-484
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/jnp.12159
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Where words meet numbers: Comprehension of measurement unit terms in posterior cortical atrophy
In:
Neuropsychologia, vol. 131, pp. 216-222
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2019.05.004
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Semantic Disorders
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483380810.n550
Research output: › Entry for encyclopedia/dictionary (Published) -
Reductions in prefrontal activation predict off-topic utterances during speech production
In:
Nature Communications, vol. 10, pp. 1-11
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-08519-0
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Poor coherence in older people's speech is explained by impaired semantic and executive processes
In:
eLIFE, vol. 7, pp. 1-43
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.38907
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print) -
Concrete vs. abstract forms of social concept: An fMRI comparison of knowledge about people vs. social terms
In:
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 373, pp. 1-16
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0136
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Revealing the dynamic modulations that underpin a resilient neural network for semantic cognition: An fMRI investigation in patients with anterior temporal lobe resection
In:
Cerebral Cortex, vol. 28, pp. 3004-3016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhy116
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)