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Professor Bruce Hood

Professor

telephone: +44 (0)117 92 88570 email: Bruce.Hood@bris.ac.uk

Room 3D22

Bristol Cognitive Development Centre (BCDC)



http://www.bris.ac.uk/bcdc/

Teaching and administration



I teach Level 1 and Level 2 undergraduate developmental psychology as well as graduate courses.

Biographical details

After taking undergraduate degree at the University of Dundee, I completed my Ph.D. at Cambridge and spend two post-doctoral years as a researcher and honorary lecturer at UCL. In 1994, I spent one year in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science at MIT as an MRC visiting scientist to work with Susan Carey. In 1995, I become an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard where I stayed until 1999. That year, I returned to the UK to take the Chair in Developmental Psychology at Bristol and in 2001, I established the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre. I am and have been a member of various professional bodies including the British Psychological Society, Experimental Psychology Society and the American Psychology Association. I have a number of honours including Young Investigator Award 1998 (International Society for Infant Studies), American Psychology Society Robert L. Fantz award 1999 and Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Neuroscience 1997-1999. In 2005, I was elected a Fellow of the American Psychological Society. I have given keynote addresses to the British Psychological Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. I also am actively involved in the public engagement of science, with numerous public lectures.


Research interests

Cognitive development from a neuroscience perspective. Face and gaze processing. Inhibitory control of thoughts and actions. Spatial representation and action. Naïve theories. The origin of adult magical reasoning from children’s natural intuitions.

Many of my current interests in the origins of supernatural beliefs are contained in my forthcoming book, “SuperSense: Why We Believe the Unbelievable” which is to be published in April 2009 by HarperOne. http://www.brucemhood.com/

Current grants

ESRC: 2007-2010: Conceptual Change as the Combination of Domain-Specific and Domain General Mechanisms

MRC: 2005-2008: The Development of Strategies for Searching and Navigating Through Space (with Dr. I Gilchrist)

MRC: 2008-2011: Dynamic Gaze Processing in Typical and Atypical Populations

Leverhulme Trust: 2008-2011: Psychological Essentialism Towards Sentimental Objects

Esmée Fairbairn Trust 2007-2009: Origins of Supernatural Beliefs About Objects.

Collaborators

Laurie Santos (Yale)
Paul Bloom (Yale)
Shoji Itakura (Kyoto)
Marjaana Lindeman (Helsinki)
Neil Macrae (Aberdeen)
Meredith Gattis (Cardiff)
Shiri Einav (Oxford)
Alan Leslie (Rutgers)


Current PhD students supervised

Alice Wilson: “An Investigation of the effects of fatty acids on inhibitory control and cognitive development in school children.” 2006-

Katherine Donnelly: "Essentialism and sentimental objects." 2007-

Arno van Voorst: “Psychological essentialism and contamination fear.” 2008-


Some recent publications

Einav, S. & Hood, B.M. (2008) Tell-Tale Eyes: Children's Attribution of Gaze Aversion as a Lying Cue. Developmental Psychology, 44, 1655-1667.

Smith, A.D., Hood, B.M. & Gilchrist, I.D. (2008). Visual search and foraging compared in a large-scale search task. Cognitive Processing, 9, 121-126.

Frazier, B.N., Gelman, S.A., Wilson, A. & Hood, B. (2009) Picasso paintings, moon rocks, and hand-written Beatles lyrics: adults: evaluations of authentic objects. Journal of Culture and Cognition, 9, 1-14.

Smith, A.D., Gilchrist, I.D., Hood, B. Tassabehji, M. & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (in press). Inefficient search of large-scale space in Williams Syndrome: further insights on the role of LIMK1 deletion in deficits of spatial cognition. Perception.

Hood, B.M., Donnelly, K & Byers, A. (in press). Moral contagion and the negativity bias in attitudes towards potential organ transplantation. Journal of Culture and Cognition.

Hood, B.M., Donnelly, Leonards, U. & Bloom, P. (in press). Implicit voodoo: electrodermal activity reveals a susceptibility to sympathetic magic. Journal of Culture and Cognition.

Hood, B.M. & Bloom, P. (2008) Children prefer certain original objects over perfect duplicates. Cognition, 106, 455-462.

Einav, S. & Hood, B. (in press). Tell-Tale Eyes: Children's Attribution of Gaze Aversion as a Lying Cue. Developmental Psychology

Smith, A. D., Gilchrist, I. D., Cater, K., Ikram, N., Nott, K., & Hood, B. M. (2008). Reorientation in the real world: The development of landmark use and integration in a natural environment. Cognition, 107, 1102-1111.

Frazier, B.N., Gelman, S.A., Wilson, A. & Hood, B.M. (in press). Picasso Paintings, Moon Rocks, and Hand-Written Beatles Lyrics: Adults’ Evaluations of Authentic Objects. Journal of Culture and Cognition.

Hood, B.M. (2008) How brains develop. Nature, 453, 157.

Hood, B.M. & Santos, L. (in press). The Origins of Object Representation. Oxfrod University Press

Gjersoe, N.L. & Hood, B. (2006) The supernatural guilt trip does not take us far enough. Brain & Behavioral Sciences, 29, 473-474.

Porter, G., Hood, B.M., Troscianko, T. & Macrae, C.N. (2006). Females, but not males, show greater pupillary response to direct than deviated gaze faces. Perception, 35, 1129-1136.

Hood, B.M. & Macrae, C.N. (2006). Look into my eyes: The effect of direct gaze on face processing in children and adults. In R. Flom, K. Lee & D. Muir (Eds) Ontogeny of Gaze Processing in Infants and Children. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Hood, B.M., Wilson, A. & Dyson, S. (2006). The effect of divided attention on the gravity error. Developmental Science, 9, 303-308.

Smith, A.D., Hood, B., & Hector, K. (2006). Eye remember you two: Gaze direction modulates face recognition in a developmental study. Developmental Science, 9, 465-472.

Einav, S & Hood, B.M. (2006). Children’s use of the temporal dimension of gaze for inferring preference. Developmental Psychology, 42, 142-152.

Mason, M.F., Hood, B.M. & Macrae, C.N. (2005) Look into my eyes: gaze direction and person memory. Memory, 12, 637-643.

Smith, A.D., Gilchrist, I.D. & Hood, B.M. (2005). Children's search behaviour in large-scale space: Developmental components of exploration. Perception, 34, 1221-1229.

Hood, B.M. (2004) Is looking good enough or does it beggar belief? Invited commentary on Baillargeon. Developmental Science, 9, 415-417.

Freeman, N.H., Hood, B.M. & Meehan, C. (2004) Young children who abandon error behaviourally still have to free themselves mentally: a retrospective test for inhibition in intuitive physics. Developmental Science, 7 (3), 277-282

Hood, B.M. (2004). Children's understanding of the physical world. In R. L. Gregory (Ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Mind, 2nd. Edition. Oxford University Press.

Harvey, M., Hood, B., North, A. &. Robertson, I.H (2003) The effects of visuomotor feedback training on the recovery of hemispatial neglect symptoms: assessment of a two-week and follow-up intervention. Neuropsychologica, 41, 886-893.

Hood, B.M., Cole-Davies, V. & Dias, M. (2003) Looking and search measures of object knowledge in pre-school children. Developmental Psychology, 39, 61-70.

Hood, BM, Macrae, C.N., Cole-Davies, V. & Dias, M. (2003) Eye remember you! The effects of gaze direction on face recognition in children and adults. Developmental Science, 6(1), 69-73.

Macrae, C.N., Hood, BM, Milne, A.B., Rowe, A. & Mason, M.F. (2002) Are you looking at me? Eye gaze and person perception. Psychological Science,13, 460-464.

Gilchrist, I.D. North, A. & Hood, B. (2001). Is visual search really like foraging?. Perception, 30, 1459-1464.

Hood, B. (2001) Learning to internalize: a developmental perspective. Commentary on the work of Roger Shepard. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 676 - 677.

Hood, B. (2001) When do infants know about objects? Perception, 30, 1281-1284.

people | academic and research staff | support staff | PhD students