Dr Alexis Makin PhD

Personal Statement

I am a lecturer working in visual neuroscience at the University of Liverpool. I began as a post doc in 2010. My research is about understand how the human brain codes visual symmetry.

A fundamental challenge for the visual system is to group isolated elements in the retinal image into meaningful gestalts or wholes. Symmetry is a perfect stimulus for investigating perceptual organization. Most of my research aims to discover when perceptual organization happens. Is symmetry coded all the time, whatever the task, or is symmetry only coded when it is task relevant?

I am interested in new ways or archiving and communicating the scientific record and fighting the replication crisis in psychology. I have curated all our EEG data from the last ten years into a large public database on open science framework (https://osf.io/2sncj/). We can use the data base to answer scientific and meta-scientific questions. The purpose of my researcher for the next 25 years it to improve and expand the complete Liverpool SPN catalogue.

My largest contribution to teaching is my PSYC301 module. Here I focus on more philosophical topics where there is not academic consensus, such as nature/nurture, consciousness and free will.

Funded Fellowships