Dr Thomas J Nyman
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Lecturer in Forensic Psychology
Specialism
- Teaching Responsibilities: I convene PY3FATP (Forensic Psychology: Applying Theory and Practice) and teach on several other modules in psychology. I also lecture on criminology modules within the School of Law, including LW3POL (Police and Society) and LW0PRO (English Legal System Project).
- Administrative Roles: I am Programme Director for the BSc Psychology with Criminology.
- Supervision: I supervise dissertation projects at the PhD, MSc, and BSc levels.
Areas of interest
Eyewitness Identification & Environmental Factors: Investigating how physical conditions such as viewing distance, lighting, and facial masking impact facial encoding, recognition accuracy, and eyewitness reliability.
Bias in Forensic Contexts: Examining how own-group bias (OGB or ORB) impacts facial encoding, recognition accuracy, and eyewitness reliability. Additionally, how various cognitive biases affect decision-making throughout legal proceedings (e.g., jury decision-making).
Technology Applications in Forensic Research: Leveraging innovative technologies in forensic psychology research:
1) Virtual reality (VR) scenarios that simulate crime events under ecologically valid conditions to test identification accuracy.
2) Synthetic faces created via morphing technology or generative AI (GenAI) for eyewitness line-up construction, evaluation, optimisation, and fairness assessment.
3) Employing Large language models (LLMs) as simulated decision-makers in legal contexts to examine artificial judgment formation and bias in comparison to humans.
Teaching
Forensic Psychology and various other modules.
Research centres and groups
- Research Cluster at the 黑料不打烊: 1) Perception, Action and Cognition; 2) Centre for Future Realities
Academic qualifications
- PhD (Psychology), Åbo Akademi University (ÅAU; Finland)
- MA (Psychology), ÅAU
- MA (Philosophy), ÅAU
- BA (Philosophy), ÅAU