Plymouth University Funded PhD studentships

CogNovo offers a choice of 12 focused research projects, based at and funded by Plymouth University. Students will be supervised by a multidisciplinary team of experts and will benefit from the CogNovo programme of intensive workshops. University studentships are open to all and include full Home/EU tuition fees and an annual stipend.

#15 Predicting creativity from spatial ability

Predicting creativity from spatial ability & personality

Investigate the neurobiological basis for creativity, exploring how biological tendencies or temperament may shape the creative personality. (more)

#16 Eureka!

Unconscious creativity: The Eureka moment

Investigate the 'Eureka' moment, using experimental observations of unconscious problem solving in architectual design (more)

#17 BrainNote

Schemata and their applications

Build a neural system that learns a conceptual hierarchy of (sound-)objects, autonomously searches the underlying conceptual space, and presents the retrieved associative concept-sequence audio-visually (more)

#18 Imagining Alternatives

The role of counterfactual thinking in deception

Investigate how people use alternatives to reality in order to deceive whilst also examining the mechanisms that underlie this relationship. (more)

#19 Moral decision making with devil and angel on each shoulder

Moral cognition: An interdisciplinary investigation of judgement versus action

Investigating the role of personality traits and arousal factors on moral decision making and the moral action and judgement disparity. (more)

#20 Attention, associative learning and creativity

Attention, associative learning and creativity

Exploring learning about non-informative cues and how this relates to measures of creative thinking. (more)

#21 NAO with Kids

Creating a voice for engagement and trust

Explore prosodic markers for sociability, engagement and trust in human and robot speech (more)

#22 Hypnotic image

Imag(in)ing Intimacy. On the representation and experience of affection.

This research is using an ontological history of intimacy to understand structural issues in the phenomenology of affect and emotion in scientific and media discourses. (more)

#23 God and Adam Sistine Chapel

The Contact Sheet as a Viable Conduit to Cognition in Action

This study will use contact sheets as evidence of cognitive processes in particular some aspects of decision making and shared theories of mind and a thinking in action in a dynamic world. (more)

#24 Ideas Exchange

Ideas exchange: Understanding the Human Object

Investigate ways to promote the exchange of ideas between scientists, artists and other stakeholders without loss of depth, subtlety or nuance to facilitate the identification and prioritisation of new research topics and concerns (more)

#25 Dancing Robot

A Framework for Intuitive Remote Robotic Control

A novel idea for the creation of an intelligent interface that allows the remote control of arbitrary complex robotic morphologies by translating intuitive human behaviours into purposeful robotic actions. (more)