Ryan Blything

Dr. Ryan Blything is a Teaching Associate in Psychology at the School of Psychology, College of Health and Life Sciences, Aston University (Birmingham, UK), where he has been employed since 2021. He previously held positions as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Bristol (2017–2021) and Lecturer in Psycholinguistics at the University of Essex (2016–2017).

He holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Manchester (awarded 2017) and a PG Cert Fellowship in Higher Education (Distinction, 2022).

His research specializes in Cognitive Psychology, with emphases on Child Language Acquisition, Psycholinguistics, and Visual Object Recognition. A unifying theme explores human generalization capabilities (e.g., analogy-based vs. rule-based systems), examining how children generalize verb structures and how visual systems recognize objects under variable conditions (e.g., size, orientation, illumination). Methodologically, he employs priming, eyetracking, ERPs, grammaticality judgments, and computational modeling.

His publications (2019–2024) cluster into two themes: vision science (comparative studies of human vision and neural networks, focusing on translation tolerance and object recognition robustness) and language processing (reading models, nonword pronunciation, and child language acquisition). Recent work extends into sports psychology (tennis timeout strategies).

Awards:

• PG Cert Fellowship in Higher Education (Distinction, 2022)