Skip to main content
Overview

Dr Georgia Punton

Postdoctoral Research Associate


Affiliations
Affiliation
Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Institute for Medical Humanities

Biography

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate working within the Institute for Medical Humanities and Department of Psychology at Durham University. My current role involves investigating the imagination through an ambitious project exploring questions around how we read and imagine called ReaderBank. In collaboration with the Edinburgh Book Festival and the IMH Narrative and Cognition Lab, I work as a 'full-stack researcher', designing experimental cognitive methods and studies to better understand the mind of the reader and investigate the hidden experience of what it is to imagine. I'm particularly interested in how readers engage in cognitive processes like mental imagery, inner-speech, cognitive control, and top-down perceptual processing.

I completed my PhD at Northumbria University between 2021 and 2023, where I investigated the role of cognitive control (e.g., intentional inhibition, working memory, thought control, and emotion regulation) within the relationship between sleep health and hallucinatory experiences. I have experience working with polysomnography and EEG in a sleep laboratory, as well as implementing sleep deprivation paradigms to understand the impact of sleep loss on cognitive performance and capacities.

I am also a keen mixed-methods researcher with a deep interest in phenomenological approaches to understanding mental wellbeing and experiences of mental health systems.

Publications

Journal Article

Supervision students