Jamie Moffatt
Jamie is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Psychology, based at Royal Holloway, University of London.
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- Email: jamie.moffatt@rhul.ac.uk
- Twitter: @JAMoffatt
- Bluesky: @jamoffatt.bsky.social
- Github: jamie-moffatt
About Me
I am currently an ESRC-funded Postdoctoral Fellow based in the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London.
My Research
My research interests fall at the intersection of three areas: Dissociation, Interoception and Virtual Reality.
Dissociation
Dissociation describes a set of experiences involving a feeling of detachment from oneself or from the wider world. I’m interested in how dissociation occurs - for example, a study I conducted during my PhD highlighted how dissociative experiences may arise from a fragmented ability to pair together senses arising from different modalities, such as vision and touch.
Interoception
Interoception is the sense of our own internal bodily signals, such as the beating of our heart, the sense of our lungs expanding and contracting with each breath, and feelings of hunger and thirst. My research explores how interoception influences the sense of our body, by investigating how ability to sense internal signals is related to the flexibility of our bodily perception.
Virtual Reality
In Virtual Reality, we can experience a virtual body that is radically different from our own from a first-person immersive viewpoint. I am interested in how a sense of embodiment over a virtual bodies can arise, and which aspects may help or hinder those feelings. I discuss these topics in detail at embody.blog.
Publications
- Browse my published research.
Cognitive tasks
- I create cognitive tasks for online use, mainly using jsPsych. Click here to try out the tasks and view the code.
Tutorials
- I have written some tutorials for using jsPsych. Find them here.
Previous Roles
After my PhD studies, I spent two years at the Lab of Action & Body as a postdoctoral researcher studying how interoception, the sense of our internal bodily sensations such as the heartbeat influence the perception of ourselves and of others.
I completed my PhD in Psychology at the University of Sussex in 2022, at the School of Psychology, University of Sussex. My PhD mainly explored how we can study dissociation in the lab, using techniques like augmented reality.
Before my PhD research I worked for two years as a research assistant for the Hearing the Voice project at Durham University. In this role I helped to conduct psychological research investigating the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying voice-hearing experiences. I also studied Psychology and Psychological Research at the University of Birmingham, where I graduated with a Master in Science in July 2016.