Paul Hoffman

Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology

Psychology
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

Tel: 0131 650 4654
Email: p.hoffman@ed.ac.uk

Street: Room S9, Psychology Building
City: 7 George Square, Edinburgh
Post code: EH8 9JZ

Biography

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.

Teaching & PhD supervision

Undergraduate teaching

My student consultation hours are Tuesday 10am-12pm

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

Mr Loris Naspi

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

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.