PhD pass for Alexia Zoumpoulaki

Congratulations to Alexia Zoumpoulaki, who has recently passed her PhD viva, with minor corrections. Alexia's PhD thesis was titled ‘Detecting Perceptual Breakthrough in RSVP with Applications in Deception Detection: Methodological, Behavioural and Electrophysiological Explorations' and was supervised by Howard Bowman.

Alexia explained; 'My research explores perceptual breakthrough in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), for deception detection applications. In RSVP, visual stimuli are presented in rapid succession, pushing the perceptual processing system to the limit, allowing only a limited number of stimuli to be processed and encoded. My work investigates what type of stimuli capture attention in RSVP, taking advantage of both physiological and behavioural measurements.'

Alexia presented methods developed for the analysis ​of Event Related Potential (ERP) data with applications beyond deception detection. The focus is on reducing false positives while at the same time successfully measuring the underlying effects. She presented and evaluated methods for measuring latencies, selecting Regions of Interest (ROIs) and testing for significance. Alexia also presented evaluations of the protocol developed by her research group and explorations on how to improve it.