Denis O’Hora BITSS CatalystPsychology

Denis O’Hora is a lecturer in psychology at the National University of Ireland Galway. His research focuses on the dynamics of learning and decision making; that is, how people adapt to the situations they find themselves in. He is an experimental psychologist who uses tightly controlled environments to identify features of situations that help us learn or influence our decisions. He is proficient in the collection and analysis of a variety of complex behavioural and neural outputs including mouse cursor tracking, eye tracking and EEG.

Supplementing traditional measures of psychological constructs is crucial for theory development in that certain tenets of theories may be supported or undermined by novel measures. However, novel measures also require considerable variety of decisions to be made by the researchers attempting to use them. Such variety is required to explore the potential of new measures but it can lead to a considerable increase in researcher degrees of freedom. Dr. O’Hora is interested in ways to preserve exploration of novel measures while constraining researchers appropriately.