Role
Sam is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology and Ageing. He contributes teaching to a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate modules, with a focus on quantitative research methods and statistics, and supervises research projects at all levels (from undergraduate to PhD). He also conducts research into cognitive ageing and multisensory perception.
Career overview
Sam’s PhD (University of Birmingham, 2019) applied functional MRI, behavioural testing, and computational modelling to investigate the effects of brain ageing on multisensory perception. He then worked as a Lecturer in Quantitative Psychological Research Methods and Statistics at Staffordshire University, before joining NTU as a Senior Lecturer in Psychology and Ageing in September 2022.
Research areas
Sam’s research falls broadly within these areas:
- Brain ageing
- Sensory processing
- Multisensory perception
- Cognitive neuroscience
- Functional neuroimaging
The ability to effectively combine information from our multiple senses is crucial in everyday life, and there is evidence that the way our brains do this changes as we get older. Sam’s research explores these changes: how and why do older adults experience our multisensory world differently from younger people?
Sam is a member of three research groups within NTU Psychology: Ageing and Lifespan Research; Perception, Attention, and Memory; and the Hearing group.
Publications
Jones, S. A., & Noppeney, U. (2024). Multisensory integration and causal inference in typical and atypical populations. In Y. Gu & A. Zaidel (Eds.), Advances of multisensory integration in the brain. (pp. 59-76). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7611-9_4
Jones, S. A., & Noppeney, U. (2024). Older adults preserve audiovisual integration through enhanced cortical activations, not by recruiting new regions. PLOS Biology, 22(2), e3002494. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002494
Kimberley, M. L., Jones, S. A., & Elliott, J. M. (2024). A content analysis of reasons for disclosing sexual fantasies and partner responses. The Journal of Sex Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2024.2310085
Jones, S. A., & Noppeney, U. (2021). Ageing and multisensory integration: A review of the evidence, and a computational perspective. Cortex, 138, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2021.02.001
Jones, S. A., Beierholm, U., Meijer, D., & Noppeney, U. (2019). Older adults sacrifice response speed to preserve multisensory integration performance. Neurobiology of aging, 84, 148-157. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2019.08.017
Noppeney, U., Jones, S. A., Rohe, T., & Ferrari, A. (2018). See what you hear – How the brain forms representations across the senses. Neuroforum, 24(4). https://doi.org/10.1515/nf-2017-A066
Press expertise
- How do our brains change as we get older?
- How do our many senses work together to help us understand the world?
- What can (and can’t) MRI scanners tell us about how our brains work?