We are delighted to confirm that recent Somerville graduate Shah Moore (2018, Psychology) has won the British Neuropsychological Society’s Undergraduate Project Prize 2021.
Under the supervision of Kate Watkins, Shah conducted an amazing, prejudice-defying project on the experience of colour and spatial categories by blind and sighted participants, exploring these questions despite significant recruitment and technical challenges in the midst of the pandemic. Shah was nominated for the prize by members of the Department of Experimental Psychology, including Professor Gaia Scerif.
Speaking about the award, Shah commented, ‘As a fresh graduate eager to pursue a doctorate and future career in cognitive neuroscience, it is a huge honour and privilege for our project to be recognised by the BNS. Having struggled with a visual impairment since birth, it means a lot to me to be able to give back to the blind and visually-impaired community with this study, which clarifies that, despite lacking direct experience, their understanding of the visual world can be just as rich and detailed as sighted individuals.’
The Judging Committee provided the following feedback on Shah’s submission:
‘We thoroughly enjoyed reading this outstanding report. The candidate did an excellent job of combining complex quantitative and qualitative approaches. The conclusions were well-justified and grounded in previous literature and it is clear that the candidate made significant original contributions to the work – in particular, the spatial prepositions experiment was an impressive, major contribution. We were also impressed by their resourcefulness by conducting all of this work in the context of COVID-19. It is difficult to give much extra in the way of feedback because it was such an impressive report, but they are a very worthy winner of the Prize and clearly have a very bright research career ahead.’
Shah Moore