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People in Mental Health and Clinical Neuroscience

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Lauren Hadley

Principal Research Fellow, Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences

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Biography

Lauren completed her PhD in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh in 2016, addressing how people make predictions when playing music together in comparison to conversing together, and has since held postdocs focusing on communication strategies and cognitive control. In 2018 she moved to Hearing Sciences - Scottish Section, an outpost of the University of Nottingham, as a Senior Research Fellow investigating conversation behaviour.

She recently won a prestigious Future Leaders Fellowship that focuses on understanding how hearing loss affects neurocognitive mechanisms underlying interaction, to find new ways to support people with hearing impairment. Hearing in a Social Context - Prediction in Communicative Interaction - The University of Nottingham

Expertise Summary

I have consistently worked across disciplines to generate insight into how people coordinate their actions so well when interacting with others. I focus on conversation and music performance. Key achievements include innovatively applying psycholinguistic methods to music to identify how people predict their duet partner (Hadley et al., 2015), extending neurocognitive theories of prediction to be relevant across linguistic and musical interaction domains (Hadley & Pickering, 2020), and identifying specific ways that listening behaviours in multi-person paradigms differ from those in isolated-individual paradigms (Hadley et al., 2019).

Research Summary

Most broadly my work investigates hearing in a social context, focusing how we are able to coordinate with others successfully. I look at a variety of different sorts of interaction behaviours, from… read more

Recent Publications

Current Research

Most broadly my work investigates hearing in a social context, focusing how we are able to coordinate with others successfully. I look at a variety of different sorts of interaction behaviours, from strategies that people use to make themselves understood during conversation in noisy environments, to the predictions musicians make to play accurately with a duet partner.

My current work focuses on conversation. To succeed in conversation, individuals must predict both their own output and that of their interaction partner. Speakers predict how their responses will sound to make corrections when they err, while listeners both predict what their partner will say, to speed up speech processing, and when their partners will say it, to prepare their responses on time. But making predictions can be resource intensive, being dependent on factors such as memory capacity. My Future Leader Fellowship will address the timecourse and accuracy of the predictions that listeners make during conversational interaction and investigate the mechanisms that they use.

Hearing in a Social Context - Prediction in Communicative Interaction - The University of Nottingham

School of Medicine

University of Nottingham
Medical School
Nottingham, NG7 2UH

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