Prof David Donaldson

Service

Within Psychology I am the Director of Research, providing oversight of research activity in the Dept (including prepartation for the future REF). I am also a member of the Departmental Advisory Group, Psychology Ethics Review Board, and The Postgraduate Committee.

Within the University of Stiling center I sit on the Admissions, Progress and Awards Committee (APAC) which is responsible for quality and standards in both undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, and the Stirling Graduate Research School Committee (SGRS) that supports all aspects of Postgraduate research at Stirling.

Outwith the University I am a member of the Scotland and Northern Ireland HUB of Vitae, a national forum for postgraduate training.

I also collaborate with Goldsworthy Consulting, an independent learning and development bussiness; together we have developed 'The Learning Process', a programme of personal and professional development that is available to early career researchers at Stirling.

One of my key external roles has been sitting on grant reviewing bodies - including acting as a member of the ESRC Peer Review College and as a member of the Pool of Experts for Peer Review with the BBSRC

History

I gained a 1st Class BSc at the University of Manchester in 1994. I was awarded a Wellcome Trust PhD Studentship at the University of St Andrews, where I studied for my PhD on Event-Related Potentials and Human Memory, completing it in 1998.

I then applied for a Wellcome Trust International Traveling Research Fellowship, supporting a two year post-doctoral post at Washington University in St Louis, using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to study memory.

I moved to Stirling University as a Lecturer in Psychology in 2001, became a Senior Lecturer in 2004, and Professor in 2007. I remain an avid student of Psychology, and hope to continue to develop the use of behavioural and neuroimaging techniques as a way of investigating human memory.

How can you remember your past so vividly that it is almost as if you are re-living the experience again? Despite the fact that remembering is fundamental to human experience and critical for normal life, how memory works remains one of the unexplained mysteries of the human mind.

 

One important step towards understanding memory lies in cleanly distinguishing between different types or forms of memory, and identifying the neural mechanisms that support the experience of remembering. To try and dissociate memory into its constituent parts, and to understand the way in which the brain supports memory, I use brain imaging methods to examine the pattern of brain activity whilst people perform memory tasks. For example, neuroimaging techniques (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Event-Related Potentials) can be used to identify a network of brain regions in frontal and parietal cortex that are active when people remember events from the past.

I am also interested in the practical and philosophical difficulties in trying to map between cognitive models of human behaviour and measures from brain imaging, including the tricky question of how we can possibly attempt to provide an account of conscious experience. My current work includes investigating individual differences in the use of memory retrieval processes, and the breakdown of memory retrieval with age.

I am currently inolved in SINAPSE, a 5 year project that aims to improve neuroimaging across Scotland. As part of my role for SINAPSE I am the Chair of the Transferable Skills Committee, which has oversight of the allocation of PhD students, training and assessment.

More information about my research, including publications and research experience opportunities, is available on the Psychological Imaging Laboratory website.

UNDERGRADUATE: I teach on a number of undergraduate modules including Cognition (46AC) and provide final year electives, as well as supporting final year project students. I am interested in providing undergraduates with the opportunity to gain research experience, in the form of research assistant posts and summer scholarships. If you are an undergraduate at Stirling, and interested in a career in research, please email me at the address above.

POSTGRADUATE: I am a course coordinator for the MSc in Psychological Research Methods. I supervise a number of MSc and PhD students; if you are interested in doing an MSc or PhD, please email me.

• Harlow, I., MacKenzie, G. & Donaldson, D. I. (in press) Familiarity for Associations? A Test of the Domain Dichotomy Theory, Journal of Experimental Psycholoyg: Learning Memory and Cognition.
• Skavhaug, I.M., Wilding, E.L., & Donaldson, D.I. (2010) Judgments of learning do not reduce to memory encoding operations: Event-related potential evidence for distinct metacognitive processes, Brain Research, 1318: 87-95.
• Donaldson, D.I., Wheeler, M., and Petersen, S.E. (2010). Remember the source: An fMRI study of source memory. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22: 377-391.
• Greve, A., Donaldson, D.I., & van Rossum, M. (2009). A Single-Trace Dual-Process Model of Episodic Memory: A Novel Computational Account of Familiarity and Recollection, Hippocampus.
• MacKenzie, G. & Donaldson, D. I. (2009) Examining the neural basis of episodic memory: ERP evidence that faces are recollected differently from names, Neuropsychologia, 47: 2756-2765.
• Hall, J., H. C. Whalley, J. W. McKirdy, R. Sprengelmeyer, I. M. Santos, D. I. Donaldson, D. J. McGonigle, A. W. Young, A. M. McIntosh, E. C. Johnstone & S. M. Lawrie (2009) A common neural system mediating two different forms of social judgement, Psychological Medicine, 1-10.
• Greve, A., Sterratt, D. C., Donaldson, D. I., Willshaw, D. J. & van Rossum , M.C.W. (2009) Optimal learning rules for familiarity detection. Biological Cybernetics, 100:11-19.
• MacGregor, L., Corley, M., & Donaldson, D.I. (2009). Not all disfluencies are are equal: The effects of disfluent repetitions on language comprehension. Brain and Language, 111: 36-45.
• Hall, J., Whalley, H.C., McKirdy, J.W., Romaniuk, L., McGonigle, D., McIntosh, A.M., Baig, B.J., Gountouna, V.E., Job, D.E., Donaldson, D.I., Sprengelmeyer, R., Young, A.W., Johnstone, E.C., Lawrie, S.M. (2008) Overactivation of fear systems to neutral faces in schizophrenia Biological Psychiatry, 64: 70-73.
• Collard, P., Corley, M., MacGregor, L., & Donaldson, D.I. (2008) ERP evidence for attention orienting effects of hesitations in speech. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 696-702.
• Rhodes, S. & Donaldson, D.I. (2008) Electrophysiological evidence for the effect of interactive imagery on episodic memory: Encouraging familiarity for non-unitized stimuli during associative recognition. NeuroImage, 39: 873-84.
• Rhodes, S. & Donaldson, D.I. (2008). Association and not semantic relationships elicit the N400 effect: Electrophysiological evidence from an explicit language comprehension task. Psychophysiology, 45: 50-9.
• Ploran, E.J., Nelson, S.M., Donaldson, D.I., Petersen, S.E. & Wheeler, M.E., (2007) Evidence accumulation and the moment of recognition: Dissociating decision processes using fMRI. Journal of Neuroscience, 27: 11912-24.
• Donaldson, D.I. and Curran, T. (2007) Letter to the Editor. NeuroImage, 36: 488-489.
• MacKenzie, G., and Donaldson, D.I. (2007). Dissociating recollection from familiarity: Electrophysiological evidence that familiarity for faces is associated with a posterior old/new effect. NeuroImage 36: 454-463.
• Corley, M., MacGregor, L., and Donaldson, D.I. (2007). It's the way that you say it: Everyday disfluency in speech has immediate and lasting effects on the listener. Cognition, 105: 658-68.
• Rhodes, S. & Donaldson, D.I. (2007). Electrophysiological evidence for the influence of unitization on the processes engaged during episodic retrieval: Enhancing familiarity based remembering. Neuropsychologia, Vol 45: 412-424.
• Greve, A., van Rossum, M., & Donaldson, D.I. (2007). Semantic and episodic memory systems interact through familiarity not recollection: Convergent behavioural and electrophysiological evidence. NeuroImage, Vol 34: 801-814.
• Paukner, A., Anderson, J.R., Donaldson, D.I., and Ferrari, P.F. (2007) Cued repetition of self-directed actions in macaques: evidence for episodic memory? Journal of Experimental Psychology: A.B.P., 33: 139-147.