Facilities, Support and Technical
The School is housed in modern, purpose designed and well equipped
accommodation which has expanded greatly recently to provide
additional facilities for teaching and for the expansion of our
research activities. There are specialist laboratories for work in
Developmental and Social Psychology and Artificial Intelligence, in
addition to laboratories for general research and for basic
undergraduate work. All the laboratories are supervised and
supported by a team of highly qualified technical staff. The School
is particularly well provided with sophisticated computers. The
university network enables staff and students anywhere on campus to
communicate electronically with each other, and with other
universities in the UK and abroad. There are separate resource rooms
for undergraduates, postgraduate students and staff.
The expansion in staff numbers in the past few years has resulted
in two additional buildings being allocated to us. These are the
Research Complex, which mainly houses postgraduate staff and is
shared with Computer Science, and the setting up of the National
Centre for tactile Diagrams(nctd), which is sited in the nearby
Yorkon Building.
The UFCE Research Assessment Exercise has resulted in a
considerable increase in direct funding to Psychology each year.
Furthermore, the School has control on the way this money is spent.
The School has also been reasonably well off in terms of capital
equipment. Funding for conferences is relatively generous with all
active researchers being able to attend at least one conference per
year, and usually more.
The School has facilities shared with the Schol of Life Sciences.
There are two research rooms dedicated to Psychology and one shared
teaching laboratory.
The School is well equipped with a network (see below) of
workstations, microprocessors, high quality printers and a range of
computer systems linked to the control and monitoring of
psychological equipment. The staff in Psychology each have their own
networked computer system.
Local Networks and
Connections to Mainframes
The School has a number of Local Area Networks (LANs) and these
link to the Wide Area Network (WAN) of the University's central
computing facilities. Two LANs are appletalk zones, for use by
students. The third LAN uses Ethernet and fast Apple servers connect
to the A.I. and Undergraduate laboratories. All the staff rooms and
the labs are connected to the central computing network and Super
JANET. This allows facilities using the university WAN for mail and
file transfer, global connections to e-mail, World Wide Web etc.,
and integration and connectivity with our IBM PC systems. The
Learning Resources Centre provides an advisory service to staff.
The Undergraduate
Laboratory is a large teaching area with 30 Mac systems
connected to the Ethernet backbone. An AV facility consisting of a
large projection screen system with connections to a computer, video
playback and OHP system is provided to assist teaching and
demonstrations.
Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory connecting 10 Mac systems via ethernet to a server
with applications e.g. Prolog, Lisp, neural nets etc. for particular
use by Cognitive Science students. The laboratory is networked to
the UNIX Sun laboratory in Computer Science.
The Postgraduate
laboratory and MSc occupational psychology area are supported
by PowerMacs and IBM compatible systems and AV facilities as in the
ug lab.
A range of Software
Applications are utilised including Statistical, word
processor, databases, drawing, spreadsheets, graph, internet access,
neural net, A.I. language etc.
The Developmental and
Social laboratory is a sophisticated CCTV unit comprising:
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Studio with remote controlled colour cameras.
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Viewing Area with a two-way mirror and comfortable waiting
area.
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Control Centre This is well equipped with a sophisticated
console for video and sound monitoring, recording and special
effects e.g. split screens, titles etc. Editing can be done on a 3
machine editing suite for S-VHS, or Avid non-linear editing system
with a specialised computer system. We are also now moving to the
use of digital camera technology.
