Senior Lecturer
- 51cg
-
- Email Address
- bert.timmermans@abdn.ac.uk
- Telephone Number
- +44 (0)1224 273483
- Office Address
- School/Department
- School of Psychology
Biography
- 2019– Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor), 51cg
- 2013–2019 Lecturer (Assistant Professor), 51cg
- 2010–2012 / , ,
- 2007–2009 Research Fellow, ,
- 2006 PhD in Psychology (Social Cognition), Vrije Universiteit Brussel
- 2000–2006 Research & Teaching Assistant, ,
- 1999 Master in Cognitive Science, Université Libre de Bruxelles
- 1998 MSc in Psychology (Clinical/Experimental), Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Qualifications
- Higher Education Academy Fellow2018 - 51cg
- PhD Psychology2006 - Vrije Universiteit Brussel
- MSc Cognitive Science1999 - Université Libre de Bruxelles
- MSc Psychology1998 - Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Memberships and Affiliations
- Internal Memberships
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- Psychology Ethics Committee 2023–
- School representative to University Senate 2015–16 / 2022–27
- Senate Assessor to University Court (until 30th September 2027)
- School of Psychology first aider () 2019–
- External Memberships
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- – Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
- – European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
- – European Society for Cognitive Psychology
- Research
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Research Overview
- Social cognition: social interaction, social sense of agency, action contingencies & interaction dynamics, gaze & eye tracking, social reward. Consciousness: perceptual awareness and metacognition, implicit learning, subliminal perception.
Current Research
Topics & Projects
Here's some of what's currently going on or will be in the near future. Undergraduates, prospective PhD students or postdocs, please enquire — people with skills in Python, Vizard, MatLab, eye tracking, or Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis (CRQA) are especially welcome:
- Social cognition in interaction versus observation
- Relationship between Ascriptions of self- and other-agency in social interaction
- Social versus monetary reward in social cognition & motor learning
- Real-time gaze-based social interaction, analysis of interaction dynamics
- Subjective measures of consciousness and metacognition
Supervision
Current SInC lab members:
- (2026– PhD student, sense of agency in interactions with AI, BBSRC EastBio DTP)
- (2023– PhD student, visual perspective taking & imagery, School of Psychology PhD Studentship)
- (2026– Postdoc, ESRC; 2019-24 PhD, sense of agency in social interaction, BBSRC EastBio DTP)
Former SInC lab members:
PhDs/postdocs
- (PhD student external supervisor, cyber-bullying and learning disorders, with & , 2020-25)
- M. Kasprzyk (PhD, behavioural effects of social interaction-related reward, 2016-23, School of Psychology PhD Studentship)
- (PhD, psychopathic traits and social facial expressions, 2016-22, self-funded)
- (Postdoc, Dual Interactive eye tracking w Virtual Avatars, 2016-18, BT Marie Curie Career Integration Grant)
Research Assistants
(2025 sense of agency and memory for faces, Development Trust summer internship); (2024-25 sense of agency in social interaction EEG); P. Mann (2024-25 sense of agency in social interaction EEG); (2023-24 sense of agency in social interaction EEG, Carnegie Vacation Scholarship); (2022-24 sense of agency in social interaction EEG, School of Psychology Summer Internship); (2020-22 sense of agency; social facial expressions, BT Carnegie RIG); (2020 sense of agency in eye gaze); (2020 self-initiated joint attention & reward); (2019 sense of agency in social interaction, BT Carnegie RIG); (2028-19 self-initiated joint attention & reward); (2018 visual awareness and metacognition); (2017 joint attention and cross-race effect); (2015 self-initiated joint attention & reward, School of Psychology Summer Internship); (2014 Dual Interactive eye tracking w Virtual Avatars, School of Psychology Summer Internship); (2010-13 Dual Interactive eye tracking w Virtual Avatars, Cologne, BT Volkswagen Foundation Grant); (2010-12 perspective taking in autism, Cologne, BT Volkswagen Foundation Grant)
Funding and Grants
Principal Investigator
- 2025–26 — "Sense of agency in social interaction through reciprocal action timing" £10,000
- 2019–23 (RIG008270) — "Experiencing myself through you: Self-agency in social interaction" £10,000
- 2015–19 €100,000
- 2010–13 — co-PI with L. Schilbach (University Hospital of Cologne), T. Schlicht (Ruhr-University of Bochum), N. Steinbeis (MPI Leipzig) €317,000
- 2009–11 €169,000
Other
- 2019–23 Participant to, and UK Management Committee Substitute for (PI Kristian Sandberg, Aarhus University)
- 2015–18 Research partner to PI , Jagiellonian University of Krakow, on a from the Polish National Science Centre — "Cognitive and neuronal mechanisms of metacognitive awareness"
- Teaching
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Courses
coordinator
coordinator
coordinator
Teaching Responsibilities
Undergraduate
- Level 1-3 — Psychology Methodology curriculum coordinator
- Level 3 — PS3015 Methodology A [course coordinator; GLM/SPSS]
- Level 3 — PS3522 Methodology B [course coordinator; GLM/SPSS; research project supervisor]
- Level 3-4 — SX3504 Consciousness [course coordinator; Behavioural Measures]
- Level 4 — PS4019 / PS4038 Psychology Thesis [supervision]
Postgraduate
- MRes — PS5302 / PS5801 Basic & Advanced Research Methods for Postgraduates [R: ANOVA/Factor Analysis/Logistic regression]
- MRes — PS5017 Research Project for Postgraduate Students in Psychology [supervision]
- MSc Psychological Studies — PS5903 Research Project [supervision]
- Publications
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Introspective minds: using ALE meta-analyses to investigate commonalities in the neural correlates of emotional processing, social and unconstrained cognition
PloS ONE, vol. 7, no. 2, e30920Contributions to Journals: Articles- [ONLINE] DOI:
- [OPEN ACCESS]
Spontaneous goal inferences are often inferred faster than spontaneous trait inferences
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 13-18Contributions to Journals: Articles- [ONLINE] DOI:
Measuring consciousness: task accuracy and awareness as sigmoid functions of stimulus duration
Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 1659-1675Contributions to Journals: Articles- [ONLINE] DOI:
A non-verbal Turing test: differentiating mind from machine in gaze-based social interaction
PloS ONE, vol. 6, no. 11, e27591Contributions to Journals: Articles- [ONLINE] DOI:
- [OPEN ACCESS]
Measuring consciousness: is one measure better than the other?
Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 1069-1078Contributions to Journals: Articles- [ONLINE]
- [ONLINE] DOI:
Partial awareness distinguishes between measuring conscious perception and conscious content: Reply to Dienes and Seth
Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 1081-1083Contributions to Journals: Comments and Debates- [ONLINE] DOI:
Know thyself: metacognitive networks and measures of consciousness
Cognition, vol. 117, no. 2, pp. 182-190Contributions to Journals: Articles- [ONLINE]
- [ONLINE] DOI:
Experiencing more complexity than we can tell
Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 229-230Contributions to Journals: Comments and Debates- [ONLINE] DOI:
Optimizing subjective measures of consciousness
Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 682-684Contributions to Journals: Comments and Debates- [ONLINE]
- [ONLINE] DOI:
How unconscious is subliminal perception?
Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Gallagher, S., Schmicking, D. (eds.). Springer, pp. 501-518, 18 pagesChapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters- [ONLINE]
- [ONLINE] DOI: