Tom Stafford
I am a Lecturer in Psychology and Cognitive Science in the Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield. I am a member of the Adaptive Behaviour Research Group .
Publications
My journal publications are here
my teaching pages are here
Other publications & activities are below
Supervision
- Tom Walton (2008-2012) 'The Discovery of Novel Actions'
- David Yates (started PhD October 2008) 'Using eye-movements to elucidate architectures of object recognition and selection' (White Rose Network Studentship)
- Despina Panagiotidou (started PhD May 2009, co-supervised with Ana Vivas, City College, Thessaloniki)
- Cigir Kalfaoglu (started PhD July 2009) 'Errors and error-detection during skilled typing'
- Martin Thirkettle (post-doc, started October 2009)
Teaching
Teaching pages here
Current courses:
Module Organiser: PSY241 Cognitive Psychology
Module Organiser: PSY6316
Debates in Cognitive Neuroscience
Teaching on: PSY101: Introduction to Psychology
Teaching on: PSY105: Discovering Cognitive Science: Minds, Brains and Machines
Teaching on: PSY303: Neural Bases of Learning and Development
Teaching on: PSY6303: Fundamentals of Neuroscience
Old courses:
PSY108: Neuroscience and Evolutionary Psychology
Grants
'A Wearable Active Sensing Device Using Tactile Displays'
2011-2012, £50,000, EPSRC Proof of Concept Funding, via University of Sheffield
'Intrinsically Motivated Cumulative Learning Versatile Robots' (Principal: Gianluca Baldassarre, ISTCCNR, Rome)
2009-2012, €5,900,000 (€771,190 to Sheffield), European Union FP7 grant.
'Teaching Synthetic Psychology With Lego Robots' (Principal: Tony Prescott, Sheffield)
2009-2010, £6,720, University of Sheffield Learning and Teaching Services grant
'Does the tea really taste better if you put the milk in first?" Scientific inquiry in public
2009, £1,130, CILASS Sheffield Undergraduate Research Experience Scheme: Summer studentship
'White Rose Active Vision Network' (Principal: Jim Austin, York)
2008-2011, £162,000 (£54,000 to Sheffield), White Rose Network studentship grant
'IBL at MSc level' (Principal: Tom Stafford)
2008-2009, £2720, CILASS Scholarship of Teaching grant, University of Sheffield
'The cognitive psychology of decision processing: How does intensity and
size of choice-set affect response selection?' (Principal: Tom Stafford)
2005, £3000, Social Sciences Devolved Funds Grant, University of Sheffield
Patent
UK patent application 1101618.5 "Active Sensory Augmentation Device", 31st of January 2011
Talks etc
'Beyond Reinforcement Learning In Action Acquisition', 9 November 2011, Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck University of London.
'Infering cognitive architectures from high-resolution behavioural data', 13 May 2011, York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis, University of York.
'A novel task for the investigation of action learning', 7 July 2010, Experimental Psychology Society, Manchester, 7-9 July 2010
'An empirical test of some philosophies of science', 21 May 2010, Heng Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies, University of Sheffield
'How do we use computational models of cognitive processes?', Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop, 8-10 April 2010, Birkbeck, London
- 'What use are computational models of cognitive processes?', 19th of March 2010, Redwood Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, UC Berkeley
- 'Using the psychophysics of choice behaviours to infer mental structure from reaction times', 15th of January 2010, Department of Psychology, National University of Ireland, Galway
- 'Pieron’s Law holds in conditions of response conflict', 1st August, presented at the 31th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Powerpoint here
- 'The Nonconscious Mere Exposure Effect with Brand Logos: Real but Elusive', Department of Psychology, City College, Thessaloniki, 1/6/09
- 'Email: the technology and psychology of continuous partial attention', UFI, Sheffield, 12/11/08
- "‘Things can be known’ : Teaching psychology through demonstrations" Keynote at 26th Annual Conference of the Association for the Teaching of Psychology, University of Lincoln, 11th of July, 2008
- 'How to make students talk in seminars', HEA Psychology 'Postgraduates who Teach' Network, University of Birmingham, 27 May 2008
- 'The psychological foundations of privacy', Privacy in Law, Ethics and Genetic Data, 1st international workshop PRIVILEGED Project (EC FP6), 10 Jan 2008
- 'Debates in Cognitive Neuroscience', Center for Inquiry Based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sheffield, 30 May 2007
- 'Is there a science of advertising?', University of Hull, Management School, 27th of April 2007
- 'Residents’ Perception of Risk on Contaminated Sites', Environment Agency training day, Leeds, 20th of June, 2007
Peer reviewed journal publications...
are here
Conference papers & posters
"The effect of acquisition of an internal forward model on an exploration task". M. Dagioglou, J. M.Bugella, T. Walton, T. Stafford, P. Redgrave, R.C. Miall. Poster presented at the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neural Control of Movement, April 23-29th 2012, Venice, Italy
"Typing errors lead to increase in power and synchronization of theta oscillations". Cigir Kalfaoglu, Tom Stafford and Elizabeth Milne. Poster presentation (by Kalfaoglu) in the British Association of Cognitive Neuroscience in Newcastle, UK on Wednesday the 11th of April, 2012.
"Instruction to relax enhances visual search performance by altering eye movements" David Yates and Tom Stafford. Oral Presentation (by Yates) at 34th European Conference on Visual Perception which will be held in Toulouse, France from Sunday 28th August to Thursday 1st September, 2011.
"Visual search performance can be enhanced by instructions that alter eye movements" David Yates and Tom Stafford. Poster Presentation (by Yates) at 16th European Conference on Eye Movements which will be held in Marseille, France from Sunday 21st to Thursday 25th August, 2011.
"Learning the long way round: Action learning based on visual signals unavailable to the superior colliculus is impaired." Martin Thirkettle, Tom Walton, Kevin Gurney, Peter Redgrave and Tom Stafford. Oral presentation (by Thirkettle) at 34th European Conference on Visual Perception which will be held in Toulouse, France from Sunday 28th August to Thursday 1st September 2011.
"What mistakes reveal about skilled performance: A stduy of touch-typing". Cigir Kalfaoglu, Tom Stafford and Elizabeth Milne. Poster presentation (by Kalfaoglu) in the Experimental Psychologists Society Meeting in Oxford, UK from Wednesday the 13th to Friday the 15th of April, 2011.
Stafford, T., Javaid, M, Mitchinson, B., Galloway, A.M.J., Prescott, T.J. (2011). Integrating Augmented Senses into Active Perception: a framework. Poster presented at Royal Society meeting on Active Touch Sensing at the Kavli Royal Society International Centre, 31 January - 02 February, 2011
J.G. Bednark, E.A. Franz, T. Stafford, P. Redgrave, J.N.J. Reynolds. Tracking the learning of actions: An evaluation of the frontal P3a component. Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting, 17-21 October 2009, Chicago.
Yates, D.J.; Stafford, T. Saccadic latency versus eccentricity for targets scaled by an estimate of the cortical magnification factor, 15th European Conference on Eye Movements, Southampton, 23-27th of August, 2009
Stafford, T; Grimes, A., Perkins, C. The Nonconscious Mere Exposure Effect with Brand Logos: Real but Elusive, The 21st Annual Convention of the Association for Psychological Science, 22nd-24th of May 2009, San Francisco, CA.
Stafford, T. What use are computational models of cognitive processes? 11th Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop, Oxford, 16-18 July, 2008.
Stafford, T. & Wilson, S.P. Self-organisation explains discontinuities in the somatosensory map. Fifteenth Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting CNS*2006, July 16 - July 20, 2006.
Tom Stafford, Mark D. Humphries, Jonathan M. Chambers. The neural circuitry necessary for decision making by evidence accumulation. Poster presented at the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience conference in Washington, DC, 11/10/2005.
Stafford, T. & Gurney, K. (2005). The basal ganglia as the selection mechanism in a cognitive task. In J. J. Bryson, T. J. Prescott & A. Seth (Eds.) Modeling Natural Action Selection (pp. 77-83). AISB Press.
Stafford, T. & Gurney, K. (2005). The basal ganglia as the selection mechanism in a cognitive task. Poster presented at Modelling Natural Action Selection workshop in Edinburgh, July 2005.
Eiser, Richard, Stafford, Tom, Shook, Natalie & Fazio, Russell. Learning under uncertainty: Manipulating and simulating the role of expectations. Paper presented at the 14th General Meeting of the European Association fo Experimental Social Psychology, Wurzburg, 19-23 July 2005.
Catney, P., Lawson, N., Palaseanu-Lovejoy, M., Shaw, S., Smith, C., Stafford, T., Talbot, S., Hao, X. (2005, 1st of March 2005). Acid tar lagoons: risks and sustainable remediation in an urban context. Paper presented at the SUBR:IM conference, Natural History Museum, London.
Stafford, T. & Gurney, K.N. The Basal Ganglia provides an appropriate model for response selection in the Stroop task. Poster presented at the Annual Conference of the BPS Cognitive Psychology Section at Essex, September 6th-8th, 2000.
Books & Book Chapters
Stafford, T. (2010). The Narrative Escape, 40kbooks, Milan.
Moore, G & Stafford, T. (2010). The Rough Guide Book of Brain Training.
Stafford, T. (2009) 'Hacking our tools for thought' in Nold, C. (ed) Emotional Cartography: Technologies of the Self, pp 88-96. emotionalcartography.net
Stafford, T. (2009). What use are computational models of cognitive processes? In J. Mayor, N. Ruh & K. Plunkett (eds.) Connectionist Models of Behavior and Cognition II: Proceedings of the 11th Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop (pp 265-274). World Scientific.Catney, P., Eiser, J.R., Henneberry, J. & Stafford, T. (2007) ‘Democracy, Trust and Risk Related to Contaminated Sites in the UK’, in: T. Dixon, M. Raco, P. Catney & D.N. Lerner (Eds.) Sustainable Brownfield Regeneration: Liveable Places from Problem Spaces. Oxford: Blackwells.
Stafford, T. & Gurney, K.N. (2006). Computational Models of Cognition. In An Introduction to Cognitive Psychology: Processes and Disorders. Second Edition. Ed. David Groome. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
Stafford, T. & Webb, M. (2004). Mind Hacks: Tips and Tricks for using your brain. Sebastapol, CA: O'Reilly.
Other publications
Stafford, T. (2009). Lessons from the campaign against Elsevier: “We won, but how did we win?”. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 8(3), 494-504.
Stafford, T. (2008). Teaching Questions Rather than Answers: inquiry-based learning on an MSc course. HEA Psychology Network Newsletter, Issue 46, January 2008. Available at: http://www.psychology.heacademy.ac.uk/html/newsletter.asp
Stafford, T. & Martin, C.J. (2007). How to do a neuroscience lab class with 120 students. HEA Psychology Network Newsletter, Issue 45, November 2007. Available at: http://www.psychology.heacademy.ac.uk/html/newsletter.asp
Stafford, T. (2007). Isn’t it all just obvious? The Psychologist, 20,2,94-95
The neural circuitry necessary for decision making by evidence accumulation
Mark D. Humphries, Tom Stafford, Jonathan M. Chambers & Kevin N. Gurney
ABRG Technical Report number 5, May 2006. Department of Psychology, University
of Sheffield, UK
Stafford, T. & Webb, M. (2006) ‘What Is a Wiki (and How to
Use One for Your Projects)’. O’Reilly Network, 7 July 2006.
Available at
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2006/07/07/what-is-a-wiki.html
Stafford, T. & Gurney, K. (2005). The basal ganglia as the selection mechanism in a cognitive task. In J. J. Bryson, T. J. Prescott & A. Seth (Eds.) Modeling Natural Action Selection (pp. 77-83). AISB Press.
Webb, M. & Stafford, T.(2004) ‘Paying Attention (or Not)
to the Flickr Daily Zeitgeist’. O’Reilly Network, 6 December
2004. Available at
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2004/12/06/mndhcks_1.html
Stafford, T. (2003). Integrating psychological and neuroscientific constraints in models of Stroop processing and action selection PhD Thesis, University of Sheffield. (abstract and contents only)
Stafford, T. (2003). Psychology in the coffee shop. The Psychologist, 16(7), 358-359
Stafford, T. (2000). Stroop Interference: Methodological Problems and Contrary Data, Psycoloquy, 11, #110.