Professor Bruce Hood
Professor
tel.: +44 (0)117 92 88570
email: Bruce.Hood@bristol.ac.uk
2011 Royal Institution’s Christmas Lectures
Room: 3D22
Biographical details
After taking undergraduate degree at the University of Dundee, I completed my Ph.D. at Cambridge and spend two post-doctoral years as a researcher and honorary lecturer at UCL. In 1994, I spent one year in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science at MIT as an MRC visiting scientist to work with Susan Carey. In 1995, I become an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard where I stayed until 1999. That year, I returned to the UK to take the Chair in Developmental Psychology at Bristol and in 2001, I established the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/bcdc/). I am and have been a member of various professional bodies including the British Psychological Society, Experimental Psychology Society and the American Psychology Association. I have a number of honours including Young Investigator Award 1998 (International Society for Infant Studies), American Psychology Society Robert L. Fantz award 1999 and Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Neuroscience 1997-1999. In 2005, I was elected a Fellow of the American Psychological Society. I have given keynote addresses to the British Psychological Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. I also am actively involved in the public engagement of science and on the editorial board of “The Skeptic” magazine. I write a regular blog on supernaturalism and science at http://brucemhood.wordpress.com/.
Research interests
- Cognitive development from a neuroscience perspective.
- Face and gaze processing.
- Inhibitory control of thoughts and actions.
- Spatial representation and action.
- Naïve theories.
- The origin of adult magical reasoning from children’s natural intuitions.
Collaborators
- Laurie Santos (Yale)
- Paul Bloom (Yale)
- Shoji Itakura (Kyoto)
- Marjaana Lindeman (Helsinki)
- Shiri Einav (Oxford)
Current grants
- MRC: 2008-2011: Dynamic Gaze Processing in Typical and Atypical Populations
- Leverhulme Trust: 2008-2011: Psychological Essentialism Towards Sentimental Objects
- Perrott-Warrick Fund: 2010-2011. An Investigation of the Cognitive Processes that Support Paranormal Beliefs
- Bial Foundation: 2009-2011. Neural correlates of sympathetic magical belief.
Current PhD students supervised
- Katherine Donnelly
- Arno van Voorst
- Patricia Kanngiesser
- Kate Longestaffe
Some recent publications
- Smith, A.D., Hood, B.M. & Gilchrist, I.D., (2010). Probabilistic cueing in large-scale environmental search. Journal of Experimental Psychology, Learning, Memory & Cognition, 36, 605-618.
- Hood, B.M., Donnelly, K & Byers, A. (in press). Moral Contagion and the negativity bias in attitudes towards potential organ transplantation. Journal of Culture and Cognition.
- Hood, B.M., Donnelly, K., Leonards, U. & Bloom, P. (2010). Implicit voodoo: electrodermal activity reveals a susceptibility to sympathetic magic. Journal of Culture and Cognition. 10, 385-393.
- Kanngiesser, P., Gjersoe, N.L & Hood, B.M. (2010). Transfer of property ownership following creative labour in preschool children and adults. Psychological Science, 21, 1236-1241.
- Lindemann, M., Reikki, T. & Hood, B.M. (in press). Is weaker inhibition associated with supernatural beliefs? Journal of Culture and Cognition.
- Baker, S.T., Gjersoe, N.L., Sibielska-Woch, K., Leslie, A.M., & Hood, B.M. (in press). Inhibitory control interacts with core knowledge in toddlers’ manual search for an occluded object. Developmental Science.
- Pellicano, E., Smith, A.D., Cristino, F. Hood, B.M., Briscoe, J. & Gilchrist, I.D. (in press). Children with autism are neither systematic nor optimal foragers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Books
- Hood, B.M. (2009). “SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable.” San Francisco, Harper Collins. Also published in The Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Poland, Spain, Croatia, Colombia, UK, Portugal, and Japan.
- Hood, B.M. & Santos, L.R. (2009). “The Origins of Object Knowledge.” Oxford: Oxford University Press.