Paul Hoffman
Reader
- Psychology
- School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
Contact details
- 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 post-doc in Manchester and briefly at Stanford University. I was awarded the BNS Elizabeth Warrington Prize for my research in this period.
In 2014, I came to Edinburgh as a research fellow in the Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology. I was appointed to a lecturership in 2018 and I am now a Reader in Psychology. I have served as meetings secretary of the British Neuropsychological Society and am currently an associate editor for the journal Brain & Language.
A full list of my publications is available on my Google scholar page.
Responsibilities & affiliations
I am programme director for the MSc in Psychological Research
Undergraduate teaching
- Pre-honours cohort lead
- Critical Analysis (course organiser)
- Integrative Psychology
Postgraduate teaching
- Psychological Research Skills (course organiser)
- Contemporary Topics in Cognitive Neuroscience
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Current PhD students supervised
- Fahd Yazin
- Erica Adazeti
Past PhD students supervised
- Georgia Carter. Effects of context on semantic representations and mechanisms in humans and language models. 2019-2024. Lead supervisor.
- Tanvi Patel. Creativity and semantic control: Cognitive and neural insights from divergent thinking to discourse production. 2019-2024. Lead supervisor.
- Elva Peng. The effects of levels of processing on long-term forgetting. 2022-2024. Co-supervisor.
- Aliff Mohd Sharif (Aysraff). Linking language and emotion: How emotion is understood in language comprehension, production and prediction using psycholinguistic methods. 2019-23. Lead supervisor.
- Yueyang Zhang. Neuroimaging investigations of cortical specialisation for different types of semantic knowledge. 2019-23. Lead supervisor.
- Melissa Thye. The neural basis of semantic processing across comprehension contexts. 2019-23. Co-supervisor.
- Anke Lingscheid, Effects of modality, administration and stimuli on picture descriptions in adults. 2019-23. Co-supervisor.
- Loris Naspi, Characterising the effect of semantic and perceptual similarity in episodic memory. 2017-21. Co-supervisor.
- Grace Rice, The role of left and right anterior temporal lobes in conceptual knowledge. 2012-16. Initially lead supervisor; later co-supervisor due to change of institution.
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:
- Functional neuroimaging studies
- Computational linguistic analyses
- Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation in healthy subjects
- Connectionist computational models
- Neuropsychological investigations, primarily of patients with semantic dementia and semantic deficits following stroke
Past project grants
• 2020-24: BBSRC New Investigator Scheme (£569,045; PI): Causes and consequences of functional reorganisation in the ageing brain.
• 2020-25: Leverhulme Research Project Grant (£257,141; Co-I): I'm still learning: Collaborative learning in person and remotely in aging.
• 2013-14: MMHSCT Stepping Stone Fellowship (£96,000; Fellow). Probing the bilateral brain: An investigation of the computational and neurobiological structure of the left and right anterior temporal lobes. (joint funded by EPSRC and Manchester Mental Health & Social Care Trust).