Dr Arran Reader

Lecturer in Psychology

Psychology Stirling

Dr Arran Reader

Contact details

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http://www.stir.ac.uk/people/arranreader

About me

I received my PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Reading in 2018. I then spent two and a half years working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. I joined the University of Stirling in July 2020.

Please get in touch if you are interested in working with me on an internship, PhD, or postdoc related to body perception, social interaction, or movement.

Other Academic Activities

Associate/handling editor for Cognitive Processing

Associate/handling editor for Collabra: Psychology

Research

I'm interested in bodily self-perception and in movement during individual and social contexts. To study these topics I typically use sensory illusions, motion-tracking, and non-invasive brain stimulation.

My research on movement in social situations has focussed on imitation. Imitation is an important skill for learning new actions, and my work aims to distinguish the brain and behavioural mechanisms underlying the imitation of actions that we know and actions that we don’t know.

My work on body perception has mostly focused on examining the links between high-level perception of the body (i.e., the subjective experience of where it is, what it is like, and whether it is attributed to the self) and motor control. I'm also interested in developing a better understanding of illusions as a tool to study body representation.

Outputs (21)

Outputs

Article

Transcranial magnetic stimulation over supramarginal gyrus stimulates primary motor cortex directly and impairs manual dexterity: Implications for TMS focality

Holmes NP, Di Chiaro NV, Crowe EM, Marson B, Göbel K, Gaigalas D, Jay T, Lockett AV, Powell ES, Zeni S & Reader AT (2024) Transcranial magnetic stimulation over supramarginal gyrus stimulates primary motor cortex directly and impairs manual dexterity: Implications for TMS focality. Journal of Neurophysiology, 131 (2), pp. 360-378. https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00369.2023

Commentary

Does apraxia support spatial and kinematic or mirror neuron approaches to social interaction? A commentary on Binder et al. (2017)

Reader AT & Candidi M (2019) Does apraxia support spatial and kinematic or mirror neuron approaches to social interaction? A commentary on Binder et al. (2017). Commentary on: Binder, E., Dovern, A., Hesse, M. D., Ebke, M., Karbe, H., Saliger, J., et al. (2017). Lesion evidence for a human mirror neuron system. Cortex, 90, 125e137. https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.cortex.2017.02.008. Cortex, 111, pp. 324-326. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2017.10.018

Article

To eat or not to eat? Kinematics and muscle activity of reach-to-grasp movements are influenced by the action goal, but observers do not detect these differences

Naish KR, Reader AT, Houston-Price C, Bremner AJ & Holmes NP (2013) To eat or not to eat? Kinematics and muscle activity of reach-to-grasp movements are influenced by the action goal, but observers do not detect these differences. Experimental Brain Research, 225 (2), pp. 261-275. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-012-3367-2

Teaching

I am the coordinator and primary lecturer for the second year module PSYU9A3: The Social Mind. I also teach an undergraduate elective on body representation in Spring semester (PSYU9X8), and a session on motion-tracking for the MSc module Research Methods in Psychology (PRMP132).

Research programmes

Research centres/groups