Ali Mair
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
Profile
Biography
I completed a BSc (Hons) in Psychology (2009) and an MSc in Memory and its Disorders (2010) at the University of Leeds. I then took two years out, before returning to City, University of London, where I started a PhD examining age differences in autobiographical and everyday memory, supervised by Prof. Martin Conway and Dr Marie Poirier. During my PhD I began working with a wearable camera, SenseCam, which we used to support memory in young and older adults. In 2016 I moved to the University of Hertfordshire, where I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for 3.5 years on a project using wearable technology to support memory in people with dementia and mild cognitive impairment, with Prof. Mike Page and Dr George Georgiou. I joined the University of York in January 2020, as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. My three-year project applies cognitive psychology to study the mechanism of wearable camera memory support, with a view to developing more efficient and more effective memory support solutions in the future.
Career
- PhD Psychology, City, University of London (2017)
- MSc Memory and its Disorders, University of Leeds (2010)
- BSc (Hons) Psychology, University of Leeds (2009)
Research
Overview
Wearable camera memory support, ageing, episodic memory, autobiographical memory, semantic memory, dementia, mild cognitive impairment, amnesia.
Projects
I am currently working on a three-year project investigating what makes wearable camera memory support successful, from a cognitive psychological perspective. This work draws on theory and observation from the laboratory study of episodic memory, and applies it to the issue of developing improved technological systems for memory support in everyday life.
I am also interested more broadly in cognitive changes associated with healthy ageing, and the factors influencing when age effects are, and are not, observed. This includes work relating to the generalisability of laboratory memory measures, as well as more theoretical questions around the division of different subtypes of human memory (e.g., episodic, semantic).
Grants
- 2020 – present: British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, “Investigating the mechanism of wearable camera memory support”. £323,659
- 2018 – 2019: British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, “Supporting consolidation of recent event memory in people with dementia and mild cognitive impairment”. £8705
- 2017 – 2018: University of Hertfordshire Early Career Research Grant, “The effect of wearable camera technology on the consolidation of recent memory in Alzheimer’s Disease”. £3817
Collaborators
Internal collaborators
Prof Mike Burton (mentor), Dr Aidan Horner, Prof Beth Jefferies, Nick Souter
External collaborators
Prof Martin Conway (City, University of London), Prof Mike Page (University of Hertfrodshire), Dr Marie Poirier (City, University of London), Prof Chris Moulin (Université Grenoble-Alpes), Dr George Georgiou (University of Hertfordshire)
Publications
Selected publications
- Mair, A., Poirier, M., & Conway, M. A. (preprint; under review). Dissociable age effects across measures of autobiographical memory. DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/bjh4f
- Mair, A., Poirier, M., & Conway, M.A. (2018). Autobiographical memory for staged events: supporting older and younger adults’ memory with SenseCam. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. DOI: 10.1177/1747021818765038.
- Mair, A., Poirier, M., & Conway, M. A. (2017). Supporting older and younger adults’ memory for recent everyday events: a prospective sampling study using SenseCam. Consciousness and Cognition, 49, 190-202. DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2017.02.008
- Poirier, M., Saint-Aubin, J., Mair, A., Tehan, G., & Tolan, A. (2015). Order recall in verbal short-term memory: The role of semantic networks. Memory & Cognition, 43 (3), 489-499. DOI: 10.3758/s13421-014-0470-6.
