Dr Claire Hutchinson

I am an experimental psychologist with interests in human vision, perception and cognition, with a particular focus on visual perception in healthy aging, neurodegeneration and disease. 

I have an MA (Hons) Psychology, awarded by the University of Aberdeen and a PhD in Visual Neuroscience, awarded by the University of Nottingham. I was appointed to the post of Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Leicester in 2007 and Associate Professor in 2015. I hold Senior Fellowship of Advance HE (SFHEA) and Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol) status with the British Psychological Society (BPS).

I conduct fundamental and translational research into how our eyes and brains make sense of the visual world. I am interested in how early visual sensory mechanisms encode information about rudimentary image characteristics (e.g. contrast, motion) and how higher-level, cognitive mechanisms weight sensory output for further analysis and interpretation (e.g. visual attention). I seek to understand how these fundamental mechanisms facilitate visual perception in healthy human populations, and how we might use this knowledge to improve perceptual and cognitive processing and vision-related quality of life in older adults and relevant clinical populations. 

My work has been funded by the Alzheimer's Society, British Academy, Fight for Sight, Freemasons' Grand Charity, Human Frontier Science Program, Irish ME Trust, ME Research UK and Thomas Pocklington Trust.

In addition to my own research programme, I am Research Lead for Vision Sciences.

(0) Souto, D., Marsh, O., Hutchinson, C., Judge, S., & Paterson, K. (2021). Cognitive plasticity induced by gaze-control technology: Gaze-typing improves performance in the antisaccade task. Computers in Human Behaviour.

Harper, L., Spencer, E., Davidson, C., Hutchinson, C.V. (2020). Selectively reduced contrast sensitivity in high schizotypy. Experimental Brain Research, 238(1), 51-62.

Dhalla, A., Pallikadavath, S., Hutchinson, C.V. (2019). Visual dysfunction in Huntington's Disease. Journal of Huntington's Disease, 8(2), 233-242.

Wilson, R.L., Paterson, K.B., McGowan, V.A., Hutchinson C.V. (2018). Visual aspects of reading performance in Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME). Frontiers in Psychology, 9:1468.

Mohammed Jawad, R.A., Hutchinson, C.V., Prados, J. (2018). Dissociation of place preference and tolerance responses to sucrose using a dopamine antagonist in the planarian. Psychopharmacology, 235, 829-826.

Ahmed, N.S., Gottlob, I., Proudlock, F.A., Hutchinson, C.V. (2018). Restricted spatial windows of visibility in Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME). Vision, 2(1):2, 1-8.

Samani, N.N., Proudlock, F.A., Siram,V., Suraweera, C. Hutchinson, C.V., Nelson, C., Al-Uzri, M, Gottlob, I. (2017). Retinal layer abnormalities as biomarkers of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Bulletin, Schizophrenia Bulletin, 44, 876-885.

Hutchinson, C.V., Ledgeway, T., Baker, C.L. Jr. (2016). Phase- and amplitude-dependent interactions between first-order and second-order patterns in A17. Journal of Neuroscience, 36, 12328-12337.

Hutchinson, C.V., Barrett, D.J.K., Nitka, A., Raynes, K. (2016). Action video game training reduces the Simon Effect. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 23, 587-592.

Swan, E., Hutchinson, C.V., Everard, M., Shimozaki, S.S. (2015). Aging effects in cueing tasks as assessed by the ideal observer: peripheral cues. Journal of Vision, 15(2):5, 1-18.

I am Postgraduate Research Students Admissions Tutor for the Department of Neuroscience, Psychology and Behaviour. 

From a personal perspective, I am interested in supervising PhD students on topics in basic and clinical vision science. 

The majority of my teaching is based in the School of Psychology where I teach across several topics and modules supervise undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations and act as personal tutor to undergraduate students. I have led a number of curriculum design and development activities in the School of Psychology including the recent curriculum transformation of the undergraduate psychology portfolio at the University of Leicester. I am also a member of the psychology undergraduate admissions team.

I am happy to be contacted by the media about topics related to my research interests in visual perception and cognition.

I currently act as external examiner for BSc psychology programmes at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh and MSc psychology programmes at the University of Bangor.