Paul Hoffman

Honorary Senior Research Fellow

email: p.hoffman@ed.ac.uk
tel: +44 (0) 131 650 4654

Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology (CCACE)
Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh,
7 George Square,
Edinburgh,
EH8 9JZ

Biography

I graduated from the University of Leicester in 2005 with a first class BSc (Hons) in Psychology. Following this, I registered in September 2005 for a PhD at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Prof Matthew Lambon Ralph and Dr Beth Jefferies (now at the University of York). 

I first came to NARU in 2005 to begin a PhD in Cognitive Neuropsychology. After completing this, I was a post-doctoral research fellow working with Prof. Matt Lambon Ralph. In 2014, I moved to the University of Edinburgh as a Research Fellow in the Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology.

For details of my current research activities, please see my page at the University of Edinburgh

Research

My research is concerned with the processes of semantic cognition – i.e., the ways in which we (a) maintain a store of conceptual knowledge about objects, words and people and (b) use executive control processes to access this information in a flexible, task-appropriate manner. I explore this using a variety of techniques, including:

  • Case-series neuropsychological investigations, primarily of patients with semantic dementia and semantic deficits following stroke
  • Computational linguistic analyses (e.g., latent semantic analysis)
  • Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation in healthy subjects
  • Functional neuroimaging studies
  • Connectionist computational models

I am also interested in the ways in which semantic knowledge interacts with other cognitive and linguistic processes. This was the major focus of my PhD thesis, which explored the contribution of semantic knowledge to verbal short-term memory.

Collaborators

Prof Matt Lambon Ralph
Dr Beth Jefferies
Dr Karalyn Patterson

Publications

Jefferies, E., Hoffman, P., Jones, R. & Lambon Ralph, M. A. (2008).  The impact of semantic impairment on verbal short-term memory in stroke aphasia and semantic dementia: A comparative study. Journal of Memory and Langauge, 56, 66-87.

Hoffman, P., Jefferies, E., Ehsan, S., Hopper, S. & lambon Ralph, M. A. (in press).  Selective short-term memory deficits arise from impaired domain-general semantic control mechanisms. Journal of Experiemental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition.