The Language, Memory, and Attention (LMA) Group focuses on cognition with a strong focus on language, as well as memory and attention. Across the group, members investigate cognitive performance from its early development in infancy and up to adulthood. The group pursues both fundamental questions such as how and why language evolved, why different languages differ from each other, as well as applied questions with consequences for policy such as how to teach children to read, or how to make airplanes safer.

Recent sources of research funding include the Academy of Medical Sciences, the British Academy, the BIAL Foundation, Economic and Social Research Council, the Experimental Psychology Society,  the Nuffield Foundation, and the Royal Society.

Member interests and expertise

The LMA group brings together many dynamic research labs, each bringing a unique perspective to investigating language, memory, and attention. Browse individual sites of group members to find out about their specific areas of research, opportunities to collaborate, and more.

• Dr Bathelt - Neurocognitive development across the lifespan in individuals with cognitive, genetic, or sensory disorders, particularly focusing on the role of executive function
• Professor Dalton - The mechanisms of attention in vision, hearing and touch; multisensory attention; attentional capture; the relationship between attention and awareness; attentional allocation during real life tasks (such as driving cars, piloting aircraft and experiencing immersive technologies such as virtual reality)
• Dr Hughes - Development of a perceptual-motor account of short-term serial memory and its relation to long-term sequence learning, particularly in the verbal domain. Empirical characteristics and theoretical mechanisms of auditory distraction and its control.
• Dr. Jasmin - The neural and cognitive bases of spoken communication, social interaction, and conceptual knowledge.  
• Dr Krishnan - The neurobiology of speech and language, with a particular focus on developmental speech and language disorders (DLD, dyslexia, stuttering).  
• Dr Lachlan - The interplay between communication, culture and evolution. In particular, research focuses on bird song and other comparative systems.
• Dr Lev-Ari - How the properties of individuals' social networks (e.g., size, heterogeneity, density) influence their linguitic skills and the process of language evolution. 
• Professor Rastle - Visual word recognition; morphological processing; semantic memory; semantic mediation in word recognition; phonological influences on visual word recognition; age-of-acquisition; cerebral laterality and word processing; speech production; sentence parsing; learning to read; language development; acquired dyslexia.  
• Dr Ricketts - Role of vocabulary in reading (both word-level reading and reading comprehension), and reciprocally, the role of reading in oral vocabulary acquisition.
• Dr Rimfeld- the role of gene-environment interplay in educational achievement and language development; early predictors of educational achievement; developmental disorders
• Dr Shinskey - Development of physical knowledge; interactions among cognition, perception, and action; development of mental representations of objects; constructivist perspectives of cognitive development; number representation in infancy and early childhood; development of pictorial competence; development of attentional capture in infants; statistical learning. 
• Dr Tamminen - Impact of sleep and memory consolidation on learning.