Professor Simon P. Liversedge

Simon regularly recruits PhD students to work in our experimental laboratories. If you might be interested in carrying out a PhD under Simon's supervision, please contact him by email.

Simon has published articles in leading international peer-reviewed journals for over 25 years. He is recognised as a leading researcher in the field of eye movements and human cognition and jointly directs the Perception, Cognition and Neuroscience research group. Much of Simon’s research has focused on reading and eye movement control and he has engaged in multiple international collaborations to investigate reading in multiple different languages. A particular focus has been how readers process sentences in languages that are quite different to English such as Finnish, an agglutinate language in which words are often morphologically complex and long, and Chinese, a language formed from character strings without spaces. The unique characteristics of the written forms of these languages offer the opportunity to investigate theoretically motivated questions that it is not possible to investigate in English. If you would like to know more about research that Simon has carried out to investigate Chinese reading, please visit the following ESRC website. 

Simon obtained his undergraduate degree and Ph.D. from the University of Dundee where he undertook eye movement research in one of the earliest established eye movement laboratories in the UK. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the eye movement laboratories at the University of Glasgow and the University of Nottingham. He then took a lectureship at the University of Durham where he was promoted to Senior Lecturer and Reader. He then moved to the University of Southampton to take the position of Professor of Experimental Psychology before joining the University of Central Lancashire in 2018. Simon is a member of the Experimental Psychology Society, having held the committee role of Grindley Grant Officer. He has also held a number of editorial roles, most recently, as Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. In 2017 Simon was awarded an honorary credential by the Municipal People’s Government of Tianjin, P.R. China, and the Tianjin Haihe Friendship Award, recognising his contribution to social and economic developments, foreign exchange and cooperation with Tianjin City. In 2019 he was also selected to attend the 70^th Anniversary Governmental Dinner for Foreign Experts held at the People’s Hall, Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in recognition of his collaborative research with Tianjin Normal University. Simon was invited to be an Output Assessor for the UK Government 2021 Research Excellence Framework.

Simon delivers teaching in some final year undergraduate courses, Master's Degree courses and supervises PhD students.