My broad research interest is in Cognitive Psychology and I specialise in Child Language Acquisition, Psycholinguistics, and Visual Object Recognition. 

The common theme of my research is to examine the human capacity for generalization and the representations needed to support this (e.g., analogy-based or rule-based generalization). For example, in my PhD research (University of Manchester), I examined how children learn to generalize verbs from one linguistic structure to another (e.g., the ball rolled →the man rolled the ball). In my post-doctoral research position at the University of Bristol (which I undertook before joining Aston University), I examined how the human visual system manages to generalize recognition of objects to new contexts (e.g., how do we recognise a new object despite variations in image size, orientation, illumination and position in the visual field?).

To investigate these areas, my research has employed a number of experimental paradigms, including priming, eyetracking, Event Related Potentials (ERP), grammaticality judgements, elicited production, and computational modelling.

r.blything@aston.ac.uk