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

Dr Christopher Kent

Research Fellow

telephone: +44 (0)117 92 88552 email: C.Kent@bris.ac.uk

Room 3D21



Biographical details



I received my BSc in Psychology from Warwick in 2001. I then completed my PhD at Warwick under the supervision of Prof. Koen Lamberts and Prof. Gordon Brown, followed by a 3 year postdoc with Koen Lamberts. I moved to Bristol in 2007. I am currently co-ordinator of the South West Memory Group (http://swmg.psy.bris.ac.uk) and Chair of the South West Branch of the British Psychological Society (http://www.bps.org.uk/southwest).

Research Interests

My general research interest is in perceptual cognition, with a special interest in the time course of cognition. More specifically, I am interested in the perceptual and memory processes that support a wide range of cognitive tasks. For example, how are perceptually processed objects encoded, stored, and retrieved from memory? An area that particularly interests me is how perceptual encoding processes and retrieval processes interact. I have studied a variety of tasks that seem to involve overlapping (and hence general) cognitive operations, including, identification, categorization, object recognition, perceptual matching, visual search, and memory search. As well as using traditional experimental techniques (including psychophysical, eye tracking, and signal-to-respond methodologies) I develop and use simple mathematical models that embody general processing principles which should offer an account of many perceptual and memory based tasks.

Keywords: mathematical modelling, categorization, time course of cognition, memory, object recognition, absolute identification, encoding-retrieval interaction, inverse base-rate effect


Current Research Grants



Adelman, J., Kent, C., & Stewart, N. (2007). Time and information in absolute identification (1 Year). £79976.16 (£99970.21 at FEC). Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC).


Collaborators



James Adelman (Warwick)
Duncan Guest (Warwick)
Koen Lamberts (Warwick)
Christina Howard (Bristol, now University of Sydney)


Some Recent Publications

Kent, C., & Lamberts, K. (2008). The encoding-retrieval relationship: Retrieval as mental simulation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 92-98.

Kent, C., & Lamberts, K. (2006). Modeling the time course of feature perception and feature information retrieval. Journal of Memory and Language, 55, 553-571.

Kent, C. & Lamberts, K. (2006). The time course of perception and retrieval in matching and recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 32, 920-931.

Kent, C., & Lamberts, K. (2005). An exemplar account of the bow and set-size effects in absolute identification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31, 289-305.

Lamberts, K., & Kent, C. (2008). The time course of object-feature retrieval in recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 34, 688-695.

Lamberts, K., & Kent, C. (2007). No evidence for rule-based processing in the inverse base-rate effect. Memory & Cognition, 35, 2097-2105.

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