A wide range of projects are undertaken with more than 400 publications arising from the Department in the last four years. Research links also exist with other institutions such as the Institute of Education, the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, Leicester, Tilburg, Munich, Boston and Amsterdam. Staff in the Department have good research contacts with local schools, hospitals and industrial firms. There is an active post-graduate community which has undergone considerable expansion so that there are now 25 full time and 15 part time PhD students plus research staff. The University has instituted a common course for all full time Ph.D. students, which is supplemented by students attending both undergraduate and post-graduate courses, and by departmental seminars.
Considerable care is taken with the monitoring of the progress of students for higher degrees.
The Psychology Department has been host to various conferences and these include the Child Language Seminar and the BPS Social Psychology Annual Conference and the annual conference of the Society of Reproductive and Infant Psychology and an international conference on Prospective Memory. The department has a weekly research seminar programme where there are presentations from visiting speakers, academic staff and post-graduates. There are a number of active reading groups which meet frequently to discuss research papers, these include developmental psychology judgement and decision making, connectionist modelling and theory of concepts. In addition, the geographical position of Hatfield means that it is easy to attend research presentations in both London and Cambridge. We have strong and extensive international contacts.