51cg

MR THOMAS ALEXANDER

MR THOMAS ALEXANDER
MR THOMAS ALEXANDER
MR THOMAS ALEXANDER

MA, MRes, AFHEA

Research PG

51cg
Email Address
t.alexander.24@abdn.ac.uk
Office Address
F18 William Guild Building
Old Aberdeen Campus
110 St. Machar Drive
AB24 2UB

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School/Department
School of Psychology

Biography

Hi there! I'm currently a PhD student within the School. I research language comprehension - in particular, how individuals predict upcoming words, and what consequences these predictions have for comprehension. I am supervised by Dr Joost Rommers and Prof Patric Bach. 

Before starting my PhD I studied both Philosophy and Psychology, also at Aberdeen. Within Philosophy I was interested in epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge), and the overlap of epistemology and moral philosophy (epistemic injustice). 

Qualifications

  • MA Philosophy and Psychology 
    2023 - 51cg 

    First class honours

  • MRes Psychology 
    2024 - 51cg 

    Awarded with distinction

Memberships and Affiliations

Internal Memberships

L1/L2/MSc Practical tutor

MRes PAL Leader (with Alžběta Manová)

Member of the Rommers Lab and the Action Prediction Lab

PhD representative for the ECR committee and SSLC meetings

School of Psychology EDI committee

Chair of APSC Committee (2025, 2026)

Co-Chair of the LGBTQ+ Staff and Postgraduate Network (with Brian Mathias) 

External Memberships

Associate Fellow of Advance HE (AFHEA)

Experimental Psychology Society Postgraduate Member

Aberdeen City volunteer

Prizes and Awards

ESRC - SGSSS Studentship (1+3 award), awarded through the Student-Led Open Competition: 2023 - 2028

School of Psychology internal funding to support research internship: 2022

Discovering research award to support research internship: 2021

51cg Merit Scholarships: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 

Research

Research Overview

My research is on predictive processing in language comprehension - that is, how language users predict upcoming words when comprehending language. In particular, I'm interested in how individuals update incorrect predictions when they are proven incorrect. 

Research Areas

Research Specialisms

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Quantitative Psychology
  • Psychology
  • Psychology of Memory and Learning

Our research specialisms are based on the Higher Education Classification of Subjects (HECoS) which is , published under the licence.

Collaborations

Pepita Alex (PhD Student, UoA)

Anita Malik (PhD Student, UoA)

Ke Zhao (MRes researcher, UoA)

Supervision

I am supervised by Dr Joost Rommers and Prof Patric Bach

Teaching

Teaching Responsibilities

Most of my teaching is methodology-based:

PS1009/1509 - Introductory Psychology: Concepts and Theory

PS1011/1511 - Introductory Psychology: Methods and Applications (APA; reading and evaluating research; designing and conducting experiments; working in Excel; conducting t-tests by hand)

PS2017/2517 - Advanced Psychology: Concepts and Theory

PS2018/2518 - Advanced Psychology: Methods and Applications (logic of Null Hypothesis Significance Testing; data wrangling and transformations; t-tests; Chi-squared tests; correlation; regression; ANOVA; qualitative methods; SPSS/JASP) 

PS5074/5075 - Basic Research Methods (With R) for Postgraduates (MRes) - grader

PS5529 - Methods and Analysis in Psychology (MSc) (t-tests; correlation; simple and multiple regression; ANOVA; survey and observational methods; qualitative methods; SPSS)

Non-course Teaching Responsibilities

MRes PAL

I have provided training sessions on coding in RStudio and MATLAB, EEG data collection, EEG preprocessing, Permutation testing, Mixed Linear Effect Modelling (including recommended best practices), and interim testing