Psychology Colloquia Series: Dr Ben Jennings

Topic: Clinical Psychology

We’re very pleased to start this year’s Psychology Colloquia by welcoming our very own Dr. Ben Jennings from Kingston University, who will be presenting:

High-level visual processing in Parkingson's Disease – towards a new behavioural marker

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease caused by a loss of nerve cells within the brain resulting in depleted dopamine. 

The disease is characterised by symptoms including slowness of movement, tremors, stooped posture and freezing of gait. Additionally, many measurable changes in visual performance have been reported in PD patients, for example, chromatic sensitivity has been assessed and shown to be significantly reduced. 

A growing body of research suggests that these visual deficits common in PD may potentially be prodromal symptoms. In the current talk Dr. Jennings will outline a series of experiments that investigate high-level visual processing in PD, the tasks focus on scene perception, and object and emotion recognition. He will outline how these tasks are the starting point for the development of a new online early PD detection test.

Dr Jennings is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Kingston University.

He completed his PhD in Visual Science at City St George’s, before undertaking two postdoctoral fellowships: first at the University of Aberdeen in the Martinovic Vision Lab, and then at McGill University in Montreal in the Kingdom Lab. 

Dr Jennings returned to the UK in 2018 to take up a lectureship at Brunel University London. In 2025, he briefly joined Buckinghamshire New University (BNU) before taking up his current position at Kingston University.

More about Dr Jennings

The Psychology Colloquia 2026/27 series is organised by Dr Goffredina Spano from the Department of Psychology at Kingston University.

The annual programme offers ten research talks each academic year. The sessions features either a Kingston University researcher or an invited expert presenting current research, innovative findings and emerging ideas from areas including: 

• Developmental psychology 
• Cognitive psychology 
• Social psychology 
• Clinical psychology 
• Neuroscience 

The series provides opportunities to explore current psychological research, exchange ideas and engage in discussion with researchers and professionals from across the field.

If you have questions about the event, or need more information about the Psychology Colloquia series, please email Goffredina at [email protected].