Hayley Wright

Healthy cognitive ageing; cognitive decline in older adults; cognitive neuropsychology of stroke and dementia

After gaining a first class honours degree in Applied Psychology from Leeds Metropolitan University, Hayley went on to complete an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at University of York. Pursuing her interests in face and emotion recognition, she carried out a final project which investigated amygdala response to fearful facial expressions using fMRI (Asghar et al., 2008). Hayley then went on to study for a PhD at University of Birmingham, and investigated the reorienting of visual attention to socially relevant cues (eye gaze shifts and pointing gestures) following parietal lobe damage, under the supervision of Jane Riddoch and Glyn Humphreys.

As a postdoctoral researcher, Hayley spent two years working in hospitals and community care settings, recruiting stroke patients into clinical research trials. Following this, she worked at University on Warwick on a project investigating the association between sleep and cognitive function in a large population cohort of older adults (Miller et al., 2014a), and also co-authored a book chapter on sleep and cognition (Miller et al., 2014b).

Hayley has recently won internal funding from Coventry University to investigate the association between sexual activity and different domains of cognitive function in adults over the age of 50 years, using novel cognitive assessments.

Area of Expertise:

Cognitive ageing

I have been interested in cognitive neuropsychology since my undergraduate degree in Applied Psychology, and for my PhD I investigated attentional deficits after stroke. I have since developed an interested in the wider, epidemiological study of cognitive ageing and decline in the general population. Through my postdoctoral research, I hope to promote the modifiable lifestyle factors which help to protect cognitive function and wellbeing in older age, in the general population. In addition, I hope to contribute to ongoing research into earlier detection of dementia, and the provision of tailored support for people with dementia and their families and carers.