Dr Fraser Milton

About me:

Fraser Milton is an Associate Professor in Psychology

Office Hours Term 1 2023/24

Wednesdays 10.00-11.00 Room 233

Fridays 13.00-14.30 (https://calendly.com/f-n-milton Online by default but you can indicate a preference for an in-person meeting in Room 233 if you prefer when you sign up).

Interests:

Memory deficits in Transient Epileptic Amnesia (TEA)

TEA is a form of temporal lobe epilepsy in which the main if only manifestation of the seizure is a period of amnesia usually lasting around half an hour. During this time period, there may be difficulty in recalling recent events or in laying down a memory for current ones.

Two additional, persistent, interictal memory complaints are common among patients with TEA:

• 'Autobiographical Amnesia' is a patchy, but dense, loss of the ability to evoke memories for salient life events, often extending back over several decades, well before the onset of symptoms of epilepsy. We are currently investigated the specific nature of these remote memories deficits. Particular questions we are interested in are: 1) Is there a greater deficit for personal than public memories; 2) Is there a greater deficit for episodic than semantic memories; 3) Do the deficits extend throughout the life time or are they temporally graded; 4) What are the differences in the neural substrates of remote autobiographical memory retrieval between TEA patients and control participants?
• 'Accelerated Forgetting' is the excessively rapid decay of memories that appear to have been acquired successfully, noted by the patient days to weeks after initial encoding. Current work has looked at accelerated forgetting of everyday information using a novel camera, SenseCam which captures images automatically every 30 seconds. Future work will examine whether SenseCam can have a beneficial effect on maintaining information over time.http://www.pms.ac.uk/time/

More details can be found at: http://www.pms.ac.uk/time/

Aphantasia

Aphantasia is a condition in which people lack the ability to voluntarily use visual imagery. This is a recently recognised condition that is currently poorly understood. Together with colleagues from the medical school, we are currently looking to characterise how people with aphantasia perform on related tasks such as autobiographical memory, imaging future events and face processing, as well as using neuroimaging methods to try to establish any neural substrates that underlie the condition.

Categorization

The ability to spontaneously group itmes into categories is an important aspect of everyday cognition. My work has looked at how particular factors such as stimulus properties, time pressure, concurrent load, and previous decisions influence the type of categories we choose to create. Some of my work has focused on the distinction between a quick, automatic, holistic system (non-analytic processing) and a more time-consuming, rule-based, system, requiring working memory capacity (analytic processing). Recent work has suggested that the use of the analytic system is widespread, and under certain condition, can be used to construct categories organised by overall similarity.