Staff Contact Information

Position:

Professor of Cognitive Psychology

Email:

Phone:

4647

Room:

238

Category:

Academic Staff

Taught Courses:

PSY 1121 Human Cognition
PSY 2017 Cognition Practical
PSY M131 Cognitive Processes

Administrative Duties:

Leader, Cognition Research Group

External Posisitions:

Associate Editor, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Member, Economic and Social Research Council Research Grants Board

Research Group:

Cognition

Research Interests:

Experimental cognitive psychology:
• attention and performance, especially executive control
(task-switching, attentional selection, inhibitory processes, multitasking);
• aspects of psycholinguistics, specifically lexical and sub-lexical processes in: language production, visual and auditory word recognition, "routes" for reading aloud, the bilingual lexicon, verbal working memory and inner speech.
• memory for recent occurrence.

The majority of my work has used chronometric behavioural measures with normal adult subjects, but I have recently studied impulsivity and perseveration in brain-damaged patients, and am now using electrophysiological (EEG/ERP) methods and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in normal adults.

Current Research:

Over the last decade or so, I have investigated the performance costs of switching between simple cognitive tasks, as a way of studying processes of task-set reconfiguration and the interactions between "executive" control, stimulus-driven activation of task-sets, and the recency and familiarity of tasks. Recent collaborators on the control process work include (at Cambridge) Nick Yeung (ex-PhD student, now at Oxford), Adam Aron (ex-RA, now at UCSD), Petroc Sumner (now at Cardiff), Ian Robertson (Trinity College, Dublin) and, at Exeter, Arie van der Lugt (now in Maastricht), Cédric Bouquet (Poitiers). At Exeter I work on ERP studies with Aureliu Lavric, TMS studies with Jacob Jolij, and with Guy Mizon, the postdoctoral fellow on my current ESRC-funded project on preparation for a change of cognitive task.

In the language field, recent projects include an investigation of whether speech production makes use of a mental "syllabary" (with Arie Van der Lugt and Patricia Jessiman), a study of trilingual language switching (with Julia Festman, and David Green) and, with my last Cambridge PhD student (Stian Reimers), an investigation of whether speech comprehension and speech production use separate lexicons of phonological word-forms and/or separate buffers for the representation of phonological sequence.

Ian McLaren and I are also investigating how we know the recency with which a perceptual object (e.g. a face or a word) has been encountered – an essential component of many cognitive skills; we believe this can be accounted for in terms of very basic associative learning mechanisms.

Recent Publications:

Monsell, S., & Hirsh, K. W. (1998). Competitor priming in spoken word recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 24, 1495-1520.

Shafiullah, M., & Monsell, S. (1999). The cost of switching between Kanji and Kana while reading Japanese. Language and Cognitive Processes, 14, 567-607.

Monsell, S., & Driver, J. (2000). Banishing the control homunculus. In S. Monsell & J. Driver (Eds.), Control of cognitive processes: Attention and Performance XVIII (pp. 3-32). Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Monsell, S., Yeung, N., & Azuma, R. (2000). Reconfiguration of task-set: Is it easier to switch to the weaker task? Psychological Research, 63, 250-264.

Monsell, S., Taylor, T. J., & Murphy, K. (2001). Naming the color of a word: Is it responses or task-sets that compete? Memory and Cognition, 29, 137-151.

Nieuwenhuis, S., & Monsell, S. (2002). Residual costs in task switching: Testing the "failure to engage" hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin and Review, 9, 86-92

Monsell, S. (2003) Task switching. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 134-140.

Aron, A. R., Watkins, L., Sahakian, B. J., Monsell, S., Barker, R. A., & Robbins, T. W. (2003) Task-set switching deficits in early-stage Huntington's disease: Implications for basal ganglia function. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15, 629-642

Monsell, S., Sumner, P., & Waters, H. (2003). Task-set reconfiguration after a predictable or unpredictable task switch: Is one trial enough? Memory and Cognition, 31, 327-342.

Yeung, N., & Monsell, S. (2003a). Switching between tasks of unequal familiarity: the role of stimulus-attribute and response-set selection. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 29, 455-469.

Yeung, N., & Monsell, S. (2003b) The effects of recent practice on task switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 29, 919-936.

Aron A.R., Monsell S., Sahakian B.J., & Robbins, T.W.A. (2004) componential analysis of task-set switching deficits associated with lesions of left and right frontal cortex. Brain, 127, 1561-1573.

Monsell S. The chronometrics of task set control. (2005) In Duncan, J, Phillips, L & McLeod, P (Eds) Measuring the mind: Speed, control and age. Oxford University Press.

Monsell S. & Mizon G.A. (2006) Can the task-cueing paradigm measure an “endogenous” task-set reconfiguration process? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 32, 493-516