Thomas Nyman
Areas of interest
- Eyewitness Identification & Psychophysical Factors:;How factors such as viewing distance, lighting conditions, and facial masking affect facial encoding, subsequent facial recognition, and eyewitness identification.
- Bias in Forensic Psychology:;Investigating how own-group bias impacts facial encoding, recognition, and identification, as well as how various other biases influence decision-making in legal contexts.
- Technology & Forensic Psychology:;Employing virtual reality (VR) to simulate real-world scenarios for studying memory and eyewitness identification. Utilizing generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to create synthetic faces for eyewitness line-ups and leveraging large language models (LLMs) to develop virtual AI agents for investigative interview training.
Teaching
Forensic Psychology and various other modules.
Research centres and groups
Perception, Action and Cognition.Academic qualifications
- PhD (Psychology), Åbo Akademi University (ÅAU; Finland).
- MA (Psychology), ÅAU.
- MA (Philosophy), ÅAU.
- BA (Philosophy), ÅAU.
Websites/blogs
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Thomas-Nyman
Selected publications
- Nyman, T. J., Korkman, J., Lampinen, J. M., Antfolk, J., & Santtila, P. (2023). The masked villain: the effects of facial masking, distance, lighting, and eyewitness age on eyewitness identification accuracy. Psychology, Crime & Law, 1–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/1068316X.2023.2242999
- Nyman, T. J., Antfolk, J., Lampinen, J. M., Korkman, J., & Santtila, P. (2020). Eyewitness identifications after witnessing threatening and non-threatening scenes in 360-degree virtual reality (or 2D) from first and third person perspectives. PLoS ONE 15(9): e0238292. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238292
- Nyman, T. J., Lampinen, J. M., Antfolk, J., Korkman, J., & Santtila, P. (2019). The distance threshold of reliable eyewitness identification. Law and Human Behavior, 43(6), 527-541. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/lhb0000342