News

Summer 2025

A new paper has come out, led by DAAD visiting undergraduate Ilona Martynenko and in collaboration with Kami Koldewyn.

Martynenko, I., Koldewyn, K., & Downing, P. E. (2025). Social brain responses to natural scene images of social interactions. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, nsaf057.

Winter 2024/25

We have published a new TMS paper in NeuroImage - with PhD alum Marco Gandolfo, former visiting Marie Curie Fellow Cosimo Urgesi, and Giulia D'Argenio!

Gandolfo, M., D’Argenio, G., Downing, P. E., & Urgesi, C. (2025). Boosting forward connectivity between primary visual and body selective cortex reduces interference of task irrelevant dimensions on body judgements.

Autumn 2024

Congratulations to Mr Deyan Mitev, PhD student, whose MSc dissertation work has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Neurophysiology: "Are there cortical somatotopic motor maps outside of the human precentral gyrus?" with Paul Downing and Kami Koldewyn.

 Spring 2024

Angelika Lingnau and I have written an extensive review on the topic of Action Understanding for the Elements in Perception series run by Cambridge University Press.  We ask what we have learned about the human ability to understand the actions of other people, focusing first on the kinds of information an observer may gain when viewing an action, followed by a review of relevant brain systems.

 Winter 2023-4

Many congratulations to Dr Paul Aitken, who passed his viva with no corrections! His thesis is entitled "The perceptual integrality of sex and age: understanding the functional organisation of face processing". 

Now published in Current Biology! "Converging evidence that left extrastriate body area supports visual sensitivity to social interactions".  

Here's a cool new paper in Neuropsychologia, led by my colleagues in Coimbra : "Characterizing the discriminability of visual categorical information in strongly connected voxels"

Autumn 2023

A warm welcome to Filip Djurovic, who joins the lab as a Research Assistant for our ESRC-funded project on "A dynamic interactive account of human visual action understanding". Filip joins us from Emory University where he was previously working with Danny Dilks.

 Summer 2023

Now published in Nature Human Behaviour: "Testing cognitive theories with multivariate pattern analysis of neuroimaging data". 

 Spring 2023

Here is a preprint of a new article involving many wonderful collaborators including Kami Koldewyn, Liuba Papeo, Etienne Abassi, Eva Balgova, and lab alumnus Marco Gandolfo! We report fMRI and TMS evidence for a causal and specific contribution of the left hemisphere Extrastriate Body Area to the visual perception of two-person interactions. 

 Spring 2023

Here is a preprint of a new review article with the outstanding Marius Peelen. The paper is called "Testing cognitive theories using multivariate pattern analysis of neuroimaging data". We hope it will be of interest to psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists interested in the question of whether brain imaging has told us anything useful about how the mind works!

 Spring 2023

Very happy to announce that we have received funding from the ESRC for a 3-year research grant entitled "A dynamic interactive account of human visual action understanding". I'm particularly pleased to have Profs Angelika Lingnau (Regensburg, DE) and Marieke Mur (Western, CA) as collaborators on the project. 

 Summer 2022

A new article with Kami Koldewyn's lab is out now in NeuroImage: The role of motion in the neural representation of social interactions in the posterior temporal cortex 

 Winter 2021-22

Preview of new work on visual perception of faces, with Marco Gandolfo, is here on PsyArXiv. The paper is now published: Gandolfo, M., & Downing, P. E. (2022). Asymmetric visual representation of sex from facial appearance. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1-11.

Spring 2021

Paul has been shortlisted for the Bangor University Students' Union Teacher of the Year award! 

Autumn 2020

Paul has been appointed to serve as Bangor University's associate Pro-Vice Chancellor (REF) as of September 1, 2020. 

Two new papers have recently appeared:

Gandolfo M, Downing PE (2020). Asymmetric visual representation of sex from human body shape. Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104436

 Williams EH, Bilbao-Broch L, Downing PE, Cross ES (in press). Examining the value of body gestures in social reward contexts. NeuroImage. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117276

Summer 2020

We have a new article in press:  Perini, F., Powell, T., Watt, S., & Downing, P. E. (2020). Neural representations of haptic object size in the human brain revealed by multivoxel fMRI patterns, Journal of Neurophysiology.   

Autumn 2019

Welcome to Marco Spitaleri, from Sapienza Università di Roma, who is joining us in the lab for 6 months to work on biological motion perception. 

Summer 2019

A new article is in press at Current Biology: Causal evidence for expression of perceptual expectations in category-selective extrastriate regions

A new article is in press at Cognition and Emotion: Perceiving emotion and sex from the body: Evidence from the Garner task for independent processes.

Spring 2019

We are offering a new fully funded PhD studentship in social perception. Deadline June 15 2019.

We'll have two posters at VSS 2019 — 

Asymmetric representation of sex from body shape

Causal evidence for expectancy effects in body selective cortex (supported by a Brain Travel Grant to Marco Gandolfo). 

Winter 2018/19

A new article with colleagues Richard Ramsey and Kohinoor Darda is in press at JEP:HPP: Automatic imitation remains unaffected under cognitive load. 

Summer 2018

Many congratulations to Marco Gandolfo, who has been awarded a BPS Postgraduate Study Visit stipend to work with Cosimo Urgesi at the University of Udine on brain stimulation studies of social perception!

We greatly enjoyed participating in the excellent Science of Social Interaction workshop hosted here at Bangor University by Dr Kami Koldewyn!

Welcome to Poppy Barsby from Bangor Psychology, and Lina Jacobs from Universität Osnabrück, who are both doing Summer internships with us this year. Poppy has been working on developing a variant of our previous Garner interference task. Lina has been designing a new fMRI study to look at how posture is encoded in body-selective brain regions. 

Spring 2018

A new article with Bangor colleagues Inez Greven and Richard Ramsey is appearing in Social Neuroscience:Neural networks supporting social evaluation of bodies based on body shape

Winter 2017-18

A new article with Bangor colleagues Jon Walbrin andKami Koldewyn is appearing in Neuropsychologia: Neural Responses to Visually Observed Social Interactions

Autumn 2017

A new article with Bangor colleagues on an interesting patient is in press at Cerebral Cortex: Human Parahippocampal Cortex Supports Spatial Binding in Visual Working Memory

Spring 2017

A new article with Leah Johnstone has been accepted at Visual Cognition: “Dissecting the visual perception of body shape with the Garner selective attention paradigm”

A new article with Marius Peelen is forthcoming in Neuropsychologia: “Category selectivity in human visual cortex: beyond visual object recognition”

Autumn 2016

Welcome to Marco Gandolfo, who has started a PhD in the lab! He will be studying the perceptual processes that reveal information about other people from the shape, movements, and posture of their bodies. 

Two new papers:

Led by colleagues in Cardiff:Evidencing a place for the hippocampus within the core scene processing network

Led by colleagues in Bangor: Linking person perception and person knowledge in the human brain 

Spring 2016

We published a new paper in JoCN:Evidence for Integrated Visual Face and Body Representations in the Anterior Temporal Lobes 

Winter 2015-16

A very warm welcome to Prof Giuseppe di Pellegrino, who will be spending a year as part of our Social Neuroscience group in Bangor thanks to a Visiting Professor grant from the Leverhulme Trust (PI: Downing). 

Autumn 2015

We have a new fully-funded (home/EU) PhD position available.Details available shortly - for initial expressions of interest email Paul Downing with a CV and a brief description of research interests.

Summer 2015

Welcome to Leah Johnstone, who joined the lab as a Research Assistant, working on projects about extracting social cues from the body and face.

Spring 2015

A new TICS Review article withAngelika Lingnau, on the role of the lateral occipitotemporal cortex in perceiving, performing, and understanding action, is now in press.

A new review article with Marius Peelen - part of a special issue on domain selectivity - is online in Neuropsychologia here. 

Summer 2014

Welcome to Dr Cosimo Urgesi, who is a Marie Curie Fellow in the School of Psychology! Looking forward to working with him...

Spring 2014

It’s (approximately) the 10 year anniversary of MRI scanning in Bangor! Early in 2004, a few of us (including Andrew Bayliss, Annie Chan, Chris Dodds, Steve Johnston,Charles Leek, David Linden, India Morrison, John Parkinson, Marius Peelen, Bob Rafal, Kim Shapiro) started getting together for regular weekly Bangor Imaging Group -- “BIG” meetings… We did our scanning on the 1.5T machine in Ysbyty Gwynedd until early 2007, when our in-house 3T was handed over. Congrats all around on the milestone...

Autumn 2013

Welcome to two new PhD students joining the lab:

Leanne Simpson, who is joining the lab to work on a joint project with with Lew Hardy and Ross Roberts(School of Sports, Health, and Exercise Sciences) to study mental resilience. Leanne comes most recently from the MSc programme on War and Psychiatry at KCL. 

Hannah Chandler, who will be working jointly in Bangor and with Prof Kim Graham (Cardiff) on fMRI studies investigating the perceptual functions of the medial temporal lobes.

Spring 2013

We've had a new Opinion paper accepted at Trends in Cognitive Sciences:

Oosterhof, Tipper, and Downing. (TiCS, 2013). Cross-modal and action-specific: neuroimaging and the human mirror neuron system.

Welcome to Dr Francesca Perini, who will be doing a postdoc in the lab on a project jointly with Dr Simon Watt. We are looking at the brain's multimodal representation of object size using psychophysics and fMRI.

We've had two new papers accepted in Journal of Neuroscience:

van Koningsbruggen, Peelen, and Downing (J Neurosci, 2013). A Causal Role for the Extrastriate Body Area in Detecting People in Real-World Scenes

Mundy, Downing, Dwyer, Honey, and Graham (J Neurosci, in press). A critical role for the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex in perceptual learning of scenes and faces: complementary findings from amnesia and fMRI

Autumn 2012

Summer 2012

We have a new article coming out in Neuroimage:

Oosterhof N, Tipper S, Downing P. (in press). Visuo-motor imagery of specific manual actions: a multi-variate pattern analysis fMRI study. 

Winter 11/12

We have a new article coming out in Social Neuroscience:

Wiggett A; Hudson M; Clifford A; Tipper S; Downing P (in press). Doing, seeing, or both: effects of learning condition on subsequent action perception.

We have a new article coming out in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience:

Oosterhof N, Tipper S, Downing P. (in press). Viewpoint (in)dependence of action representations: an MVPA study.

Congratulations to Dr Martijn van Koningsbruggen, who has accepted a postdoc position at CIMeC in Rovereto, Italy!

Fall 2011

We have a new article coming out inJ. Neurophysiology entitled Mapping brain activation and information during category-specific visual working memory

Summer 2011

John Kontaris and Paul Downing have a new article coming out inPerception titled Reflections on the hand: the use of a mirror highlights the contributions of perceived and interpreted representations in the rubber hand illusion. 

Spring 2011

John Taylor and Paul Downing have a new review article coming out inJournal of Cognitive Neurosciencetitled Division of labor between lateral and ventral extrastriate representations of faces, bodies, and objects

Paul Downing and Marius Peelen have a new Discussion target article coming out in Cognitive Neuroscience on The role of occipitotemporal body-selective regions in person perception. 

Nick Oosterhof, Tobias Wiestler and Joern Diedrichsen released version 0.2 of "surfing", a Matlab toolbox for surface-based voxel selection. This toolbox provides functionality for surface-based multivariate information mapping of the cerebral cortex using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging data.

Winter 10/11

We've had a paper recently accepted at Brain and Cognition:

Wiggett A, Hudson M, Tipper S, Downing P. Learning associations between action and perception: Effects of incompatible training on body part and spatial priming

Summer 2010

Congratulations to Dr John Taylor, who passed his viva with no corrections!

We've had a paper recently accepted at Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience: Wiggett A, Downing P. Representation of action in occipitotemporal cortex

Spring 2010

We've had a paper recently accepted at J Neurophysiology:

Oosterhof N, Wiggett A, Diedrichsen J, Tipper S, Downing P. Surface-based information mapping reveals crossmodal vision-action representations in human parietal and occipitotemporal cortex

We've had a paper recently accepted at Neuroimage:

Oosterhof N, Wiestler T, Downing P, Diedrichsen J. A comparison of volume-based and surface-based multi-voxel pattern analysis

We've had a paper recently accepted at Brain and Cognition:

Taylor J, Roberts M, Downing P, Thierry G. Functional characterization of the extrastriate body area based on the N1 ERP component.

Congratulations to Nick Oosterhof, who received a travel grant and a speaking slot for the upcoming CAOS conference.

Winter 09/10

Welcome to Dr Martijn van Koningsbruggen, who is starting a 2-year postdoc on our Leverhulme-funded TMS/fMRI project. 

We've had a paper recently accepted at J Neurophys: 

Taylor J, Wiggett A, Downing P. fMRI–Adaptation Studies of Viewpoint Tuning in the Extrastriate and Fusiform Body Areas. in press, Journal of Neurophysiology.

Fall 2009

Welcome to John Kontaris, who is starting his PhD in the lab.

Paul Downing and Nick Oosterhof will be at SFN in Chicago, presenting work on visual-motor congruency in extrastriate cortex, and MVPA work on the "mirror system" -- Posters 168.6/W13 and 577.13/FF132

Summer 2009

Congratulations to Nick Oosterhof on receiving a Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds PhD Fellowship!

Paul Downing (with co-Is Steve Tipper, Bob Rafal, and Martin Giese) was awarded a 2-year grant from the Leverhulme Trust to conduct TMS and fMRI studies of the action-perception network.