Barry Hughes

Phone: +64 9 373 7599 ext 85265
Email: b.hughes@auckland.ac.nz
Room: HSB 612
Office hours: Please email for appointment

Barry teaches courses in cognitive psychology at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He has lectured, at various times, in other departments and programmes (Forensic Science, Sports Science, Continuing Education, New Start). He has also conducted research and/or taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Arizona State University (in the US), Uppsala University (in Sweden) and the Catholic University of Chile. He currently has a teaching improvement grant with Jonathan McKeown-Green (Philosophy) to make some innovations to the popular General Education course, PHIL105G Critical Thinking. He is active in union activities and is Health and Safety officer in the local branch of the Tertiary Education Union. He has served for several years on the university’s Human Participants Ethics Committee, was a subprofessorial member of Senate, a member of the Senate’s International committee, as well as numerous campus, faculty and departmental committees.

Barry’s research interests lie in the linkages between perception, cognition and motor control. He specialises in the cognitive psychology of blindness, especially how the brain reads braille, the sensory and motor sophistication of the human hand, sensory substitution, and cognition in the absence of vision.

• Hughes, B. & Mathur, A. (2011). The curious intermittency of the braille-reading finger. Proceedings of the 38th Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference.
• Hughes, B (2011). ‘Movement kinematics of the braille–reading finger.’ Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness. 105, 370-381.
• Hughes, B, AWA Van Gemmert & GE Stelmach (2011). ‘Linguistic and perceptual-motor contributions to the kinematic properties of the braille reading finger’. Human Movement Science, 30, 711-730.
• Hughes, B & Hedgpeth, T (2010). ‘What finger movements reveal about cognitive processing during braille reading’. Proceedings of Research in the Rockies: Research Braille Summit on Braille Reading and Writing. Denver, CO.
• Hughes, B, Van Gemmert, A. W. A., & Stelmach, G. E. (2009). The intermittency of braille reading finger velocities. In A. Vinter and J. L. Velay (Eds.), Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the International Graphonomics Society (pp. 190-193). Nijmegen: IGS.
• Hughes, B & C White (2008). ‘Continuity across cuts: An experimental investigation into the 2-frame rule’. In Proceedings of the Biennial Conference of the Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image. Madison, Wisconsin.
• Hughes, B (2007). ‘Proximal stimulation, objects of perception and the blind’. Commentary on HC Dijkerman and EHF de Haan, Somatosensory processes subserving perception and action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30, 212-213.

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