My research sits at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, auditory perception, and social cognition, with a central focus on how humans extract meaning, identity, and social information from voices. I investigate how paralinguistic cues (such as speaker identity, emotion, and accent) are represented across hierarchical stages of processing, why these representations vary across individuals, and how they shape behaviour. Methodologically, I combine behavioural experiments and neuroimaging (EEG/ERPs, fMRI) with sound morphing and adaptation designs.

One current line of work examines regional accents as powerful social signals that bias behaviour. Using implicit measures and neuroimaging, I show that subtle accent variation is rapidly mapped onto social categories, producing robust in‑group preferences and engaging networks sensitive to social relevance. This work links accent‑based group membership to judgement and decision‑making even between mutually intelligible speakers.

More broadly, I’m interested in the malleability of auditory perception, i.e. how what we hear is reshaped by exposure, context, and social expectations. To this end, I have branched out into studying speech perception in adverse listening conditions, foregrounding context as a cue for comprehension when signals are noisy. I am interested in how minimal context boosts recognition of ambiguous targets, how these benefits interact with low‑level auditory abilities (e.g., pitch/rhythm perception) and cognitive resources (e.g., working memory), and why individuals differ in their efficiency of using context.

I am a member of the Bangor Imaging Unit (http://biu.bangor.ac.uk/index.php.en).

Qualifications

• BSc University of Aberdeen
• MRes University of Aberdeen
• PhD University of Aberdeen
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy FHEA Bangor University

I teach the Year‑3 core module Cognitive Neuroscience and supervise undergraduate and postgraduate projects on sound perception. My interests include the perception of speaker identity and regional accents; affective neuroscience across face, voice, speech prosody and music; and the malleability of perception, i.e. how adaptation, context and learning reshape what we hear.