Brodie Mangan

Cognitive Psychologist/Neuroscientist; PhD Researcher; University of Stirling

About

Hello there! I'm Brodie. My research focuses on the neural mechanisms of attention and working memory — how the brain coordinates, maintains, and protects cognitive representations under sustained demand. I use EEG and electrophysiological methods to map the oscillatory architecture that supports these processes, and to understand how that architecture breaks down when cognitive effort is prolonged.

My PhD began with an applied question in environmental psychology, but I quickly found that the field lacked the methodological foundations to answer it: most studies never verified genuine cognitive fatigue before claiming restoration, and induction paradigms were confounded. Rather than building on unstable ground, I went back to first principles. That pivot led me to the fundamental cognitive and neural mechanisms that now define my research.

The result is a self-directed research programme spanning theory, tools, and empirical validation. I developed a neurophysiological framework linking active cognitive fatigue to the breakdown of working memory's oscillatory architecture, specifically, theta–gamma phase–amplitude coupling across frontal–parietal networks. I built WAND, an open-source adaptive N-back suite that resolves methodological confounds in fatigue research, and am now running an EEG study testing these predictions directly.

Before academia, I served as a paratrooper in the Parachute Regiment and spent over a decade working in fitness. That background taught me discipline, structured problem-solving, and the value of methodological rigour, qualities that now shape how I approach research.

Latest News

6 Mar 2026 ScholarRef v1.0.1 released - a free Windows app for converting APA 7, Harvard, and Vancouver citations in Word documents.

17 Feb 2026 Opinion article on nature-cognition methodology accepted for publication in Frontiers in Psychology.

23 Jan 2026 12,500-word methods paper submitted for peer review; preprint on PsyArXiv.