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Tim Jones

2nd Year Postgraduate

telephone: +44 (0)117 33 17895 email : Timothy.Jones@bris.ac.uk

4D26

Biographical details

After gaining a BSc (1st class) in Computer Science from the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1999, I worked for an education-focussed internet service provider for four years before deciding this wasn't for me. The next few years comprised a mixture of part-time social care work (in the community with adults with learning difficulties and on adult mental health wards), travelling to far-flung places, and studying for psychology qualifications. This culminated in a Graduate Diploma in Psychology (with distinction) from Cardiff University in 2007. I then spent a year working as a research assistant at Bristol University under the supervision of Klaus Oberauer, investigating the 'focus of attention' within working memory. In February 2009, I began a three-year PhD funded by the ESRC, under the supervision of Simon Farrell, investigating the links between long-term and short-term memory.

Research interests

My doctoral research focusses on the mechanisms by which things we have already learnt affect our working memory, in particular our memory for sequence orderings. For example, it is easier to remember words that make up a sentence than words that don't. This could be because a sentence can be considered as 1 item in working memory, whilst unrelated words are several items, so more to remember. However, there may also be a natural bias to fit words into patterns we have often experienced in the past. This would aid memory for familiar sequences, but actually harm memory for unfamiliar sequences as they are changed to fit into more familiar patterns. A primary aim of the experiments I have run so far is to explore whether there is such a bias and investigate what impact it has on common working memory tasks.

I have also used my computing skills to create a web-site to facilitate participants' booking timeslots for experiments (http://psyexperiments.psy.bris.ac.uk), and web-sites for two conferences: The fourth european working memory symposium 2008 (http://memory.psy.bris.ac.uk/ewoms), and Young Neuroscientists' Day 2010 (http://www.youngneuroscientistsday.com).

Talks and Presentations

Jones, T., & Farrell, S. (2010). How does background knowledge contribute to short-term memory tasks? Poster presented at the ESCOP Summer School in Computational and Mathematical Modelling of Cognition, Mallnitz, Austria, 9th July.

Jones, T., & Farrell, S. (2010). Why are familiar sequences easier to remember? University of Bristol Annual Post-Graduate Conference, University of Bristol, 25th June.

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