Dr Devin Terhune PhD

I joined the Department of Psychology at KCL in 2022 as a Reader in Experimental Psychology. I completed my BA in Philosophy and Psychology at Concordia University (Canada), my MSc in Psychology (with distinction) at the University of Liverpool, and my PhD in Psychology at Lund University (Sweden). After completing my PhD, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. More recently, before joining KCL, I lectured in statistics and coding in the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Research Interests:

My research falls at the interface between experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neuropsychiatry. I am primarily interested in how various features of awareness and perception can be altered or modulated. This had led to a deep interest in how verbal suggestion can be used to modulate awareness such as in the contexts of hypnosis, placebo, and nocebo. Much of our research aims to characterise the neurocognitive profile of individuals who are highly responsive to verbal suggestions.

Alongside this strand of work, I have a long-standing interest in altered awareness in dissociative states (e.g., depersonalisation/derealisation) and dissociative disorders and functional neurological disorder (e.g., non-epileptic seizures). We frequently conduct research on related phenomena such as hallucinations and distortions in the sense of agency and metacognition. 

In the more basic research in our lab, a major research interest is time perception, namely the factors that contribute to transient fluctuations in our experience of time as well as distortions in timing. A considerable amount of our research is in concerned with intra-individual variability as well as inter-individual heterogeneity in these phenomena.

We study these different phenomean using a variety of methods including EEG, psychopharmacological methods (e.g., nitrous oxide and psychedelics), non-invasive brain stimulation, eye-tracking, and a diverse array of statistical approaches. If you are interested in joining our lab as a postdoc, PhD student, BSc/MSc student, or research intern, please email me.

• Consciousness
• Dissociative states and disorders
• Functional neurological disorder
• Hallucinations
• Hypnosis
• Metacognition
• Placebo/nocebo responses
• Psychedelics
• Time perception
• Verbal suggestion and suggestibility

Teaching:

I lecture on cognition, perception and statistics on the BSc Psychology programme and on statistics on the MSc Early intervention in psychosis programme.

Expertise and public engagement:

I co-lead the Science of Suggestion, an online seminar series that aims to bring together researchers and clinicians studying verbal suggestion and germane effects. In addition, I am an Associate Editor for Consciousness and Cognition.