Professor Graham Edgar
Professor of Psychology and Applied Neuroscience
Graham’s career has been spent working both in industry (BAE Systems – formerly British Aerospace) and academia - and his research background can best be described as eclectic, spanning neuroscience, psychology, clinical psychophysics, optometry, and human factors in a wide range of contexts. The unifying theme has always been how humans make sense of the world, and what happens when they don’t. An early interest in perception developed into an interest in how people are fooled by illusions and ‘magic’. A later interest in human factors developed into an interest in how people are fooled by the world, and how this can lead to (military, medical, fireground and driving) accidents.
SITUATION AWARENESS IN SAFETY-CRITICAL SITUATIONS
Graham’s current research interests are in the application of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience methods to ‘real-world’ issues such as situation awareness in pressured and safety-critical domains including driving, health, military and firefighting. Graham and his colleagues have, over many years, developed novel models and methods of measuring situation awareness, underpinned by neuroscience.
In order to better understand the workings of the human mind when things go wrong, Graham now uses two mind-reading methods: electroencephalography (EEG), which works quite well – and magic, which doesn’t. This may be because, despite his best efforts, Graham is a psychologist and a neuroscientist - not a magician.
View Graham's staff profile
View all Graham's publications