Dr Gwijde Maegherman

Undergraduate Teaching

PSZ216 - Health Psychology

In this Health Psychology course, we look at the interaction between health, the mind and behaviour. This course focuses on health and risk behaviours, inequalities in health, health intervention and policy, as well as more physical aspects of health including symptom and pain perception, health provider-patient interaction, and the outcomes of stress, chronic illness and sport.

PSZ211 - Cognitive Psychology

In this Cognitive Psychology course, we look at how we understand human cognition through the observation of people's behaviour when they perform cognitive tasks. This course focuses on the interactions between psychology, cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychology and various models of cognition.

Postgraduate Teaching

PSY705P - Cognitive Neuroscience

In this Cognitive Neuroscience course, we look at a number of different methods in cognitive neuroscience, including EEG, fMRI, psychophysiology and neuroscientific interventions, to better understand their applications to mental health research and psychopathology. The course has a strong hands-on component, featuring a number of data collection and data analysis workshops.

Research

Research Interests:

As a Teaching and Scholarship member of academic staff, my primary research interests relate to language, thought, mental health and education. I run the Language and Thought Investigative Laboratory, a lab where students are welcome to investigate the interaction between language and thought, with a focus on the following topics:

Inner speech, thought, and language

Among the more philosophical interests of the lab is the connection between inner speech and thought. Inner speech is a phenomenon that many, but certainly not all people, experience as a matter of course. Some of the questions we ask are:

• How does inner speech come to be, and what is its function?
• What is the difference between inner speech and thought?
• How do inner speech and thought relate to language as we use it to communicate with others?

Self-talk and mental health

We often talk to ourselves, using our inner speech or even out loud, when we find it useful: for instance, when trying to work out a difficult problem or when pushing ourselves to go the extra mile. Evidently we use self-talk as a cognitive aid, but there are also issues surrounding rumination, intrusive thoughts, and auditory verbal hallucinations. Some of the questions we ask are:

• What is the role of self-talk in sustaining a positive mental health state?
• How do our self-talk (i.e., our own voice) and other voices we might hear affect our mental health?
• How does our perception of our own voice relate to our sense of self?

Voice identity, AI, and learning

We find it easy to identify family and friends by their voice alone, and our voice is an important part of our identity. At the same time, people often rehearse information in order to memorise and learn it. Recent advances in AI have led to interesting questions regarding how automated narration may change how we see voice identity, and how we approach learning. Some of the questions we ask are:

• What role does voice identity play in our behaviour?
• Do we learn better if, e.g., we hear information in our own voice, our parents' voices, or our educators' voices?
• How might AI voice generation affect the way we learn?

 

 

Publications

2022

Nuttall, H. E., Maegherman, G., Devlin, J. T., & Adank, P. (2022). Speech motor facilitation is not affected by ageing but is modulated by task demands during speech perception. Neuropsychologia, 166, 108135. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.108135 

2020

Maegherman, G. G. L. (2020). The cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in motor imagery of speech (Doctoral dissertation, UCL (University College London)). https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10116884 

2019

Maegherman, G., Nuttall, H. E., Devlin, J. T., & Adank, P. (2019). Motor imagery of speech: the involvement of primary motor cortex in manual and articulatory motor imagery. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 13, 195. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00195 

2018

Adank, P., Kennedy-Higgins, D., Maegherman, G., Hannah, R., & Nuttall, H. E. (2018). Effects of coil orientation on motor evoked potentials from orbicularis oris. Frontiers in neuroscience, 12, 683. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2018.00683 

Adank, P., Nuttall, H., Bekkering, H., & Maegherman, G. (2018). Effects of stimulus response compatibility on covert imitation of vowels. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 80, 1290-1299. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-018-1501-3