Welcome to Dr Georgia Punton

Georgia is a Postdoctoral Research Associate working within the Institute for Medical Humanities and Department of Psychology at Durham University. Her main role in the IMH is to investigate the imagination through an ambitious project looking to create the ReaderBank, a research database for the examination of questions around how we read and imagine. In collaboration with the Edinburgh Book Festival and the IMH Narrative and Cognition Lab, Georgia will conceptualise and design engaging experimental cognitive methods to better understand the mind of the reader and investigate the hidden experience of what it is to imagine. She is particularly interested in how readers engage in cognitive processes like mental imagery, inner-speech, cognitive control, and top-down perceptual processing.

Within her PhD from 2021 to 2023, Georgia investigated the role of cognitive control (e.g., intentional inhibition, working memory, thought control, and emotion regulation) within the relationship between sleep health and hallucinatory experiences. She also examined mental wellbeing and experiences of mental health systems in several phenomenological studies.