Tom Mercer

Biography

I completed both my BSc (Hons) Psychology degree and PhD (Cognitive Psychology) at the University of Leeds. My doctoral research investigated short-term auditory memory and forgetting and was supervised by Dr Denis McKeown and Dr Richard Wilkie. I completed my PhD in 2011 and began working at the University of Wolverhampton in the same year. I teach widely on the psychology undergraduate degrees and lecture on various modules including Research Methods in Psychology: Basic, Cognitive Psychology and Cognition and Individual Differences. I am a member of the Cognition in Context (CiC) research group and conduct experimental investigations into memory and forgetting. I am particularly interested in understanding how short-term representations are encoded, maintained and lost.

Research Interest

Sensory memory, attention, mind wandering short-term/working memory, emotional memory, forgetting, auditory perception and cognition, experimental psychology. Current Research Projects Time and forgetting in short-term memory. On-going research is exploring how the passage of time affects the accuracy, strength and lifetime of short-term memory. The role of trace decay, temporal distinctiveness and retroactive interference are being tested using different methodologies. This work is primarily investigating nonverbal visual memory, partly in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Leeds.