Dr Kris McCarty

His PhD research investigated female perceptions of male dance movements where he pioneered the use of a 3D motion capture suite in Sports Central to precisely record the movements of men with clinical accuracy. He then converted the resulting movement data (which is a collection of moving dots) into standardised humanoid avatars (or virtual CGI characters) before getting them rated by women. He has published his findings in high quality international journals such as Biology Letters.

Following his PhD, Kris was granted a Research Fellowship at Northumbria to continue his work in biological motion, further develop his motion capture technology and to expand its focus to other areas of psychology. Kris is currently developing a methodology that will allow for the recording of intricate hand gestures and facial expressions that will be used to investigate emotion perception problems with those with intellectual disabilities and autism. In addition to this, he is also working on the development of hyper realistic CGI characters for use in a variety of studies and disciplines (for example, evolutionary psychology, neuropsychology, body image and cognitive psychology) that will vastly improve the stimuli in these areas of research by removing all ambiguities of past work whilst still maintaining precise control over their features. Examples of these can be found on his personal website.

In addition to his research activities, Kris is also the Psychology Lab Manager where he oversees the department’s specialist hardware and software (for example eye trackers, body scanners, stimuli presentation computers, motion capture systems and virtual reality suite) and provides training to staff and students on their use. Also as part of this role, Kris programs bespoke experiments for staff and students using Python and the PsychoPy libraries.

I am currently a Research Fellow and Laboratory Manager in the Department of Psychology where my primary focus is the use of technology in research. I oversee all the departments technical resources including eye-trackers, motion capture suites and VR labs where I train staff and students on their use. I also am the departments primary programmer for experimental and data analysis routines using a variety of languages (e.g. Python, C++, JavaScript, R). Furthermore, I engineer bespoke electronics for use in data acquisition and analysis such as input devices, distance and motion sensing, and TTL triggers.  

I teach on the MRes Psychology course where I teach students psychological research skills and techniques. This module introduces students to using experiment development software as well as scripting languages to run experiment and data analysis routines. The module also introduces students to the use of specialist hardware to support research questions and hypotheses.