Mark Mon-Williams

University of Leeds · School of Psychology

Studies of perception, cognition, and action increasingly rely on measures derived from the movements of a cursor to investigate how psychological processes unfold over time. This method is one of the most sensitive measures available for remote experiments conducted online, but experimenters have little control over the input device used by partic...

This chapter presents a comprehensive exploration of the integration of robotic and virtual reality technologies with EEG-driven brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). Drawing from diverse applications across fields such as commercial, healthcare, and entertainment, the chapter underscores the potential of EEG–BCI integration with external devices. We f...

In a post-pandemic world, school absence is an ever-increasing concern for governments, school leaders, and local authorities worldwide. School absence is associated with poor academic outcomes and long-term illness (physical and mental). Absenteeism increases the risk of financial difficulties in adulthood and involvement in the criminal justice s...

Background Tackling multimorbidity (ICM-MM) of internalising conditions (IC) and cardiometabolic conditions (CM) is key to improving the future of healthcare. Early life factors such as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been linked to long term, poor mental and physical health conditions. AimsThis study investigated whether: 1) ACEs increas...

On the centenary of the first human EEG recording, more than 500 experts reflect on the impact that this discovery has had on our understanding of the brain and behaviour. We document their priorities and call for collective action focusing on validity, democratization and responsibility to realize the potential of EEG in science and society over t...

Background Sensorimotor processes underpin skilled human behaviour and can thus act as an important marker of neurological status. Kinematic assessments offer objective measures of sensorimotor control but can generate countless output variables. This study sought to guide future analyses of such data by determining the key variables that capture c...

Post-pandemic school absence is an increasing concern for governments worldwide. Absence is associated with poor academic outcomes and long-term illness (physical and mental). Absenteeism increases the risk of financial difficulties in adulthood and involvement in the criminal justice system. We hypothesized that early childhood problems might be a...

Studies of perception, cognition, and action increasingly rely on measures derived from the movements of a cursor to investigate how psychological processes unfold over time. This method is one of the most sensitive measures available for remote experiments conducted online, but experimenters have little control over the input device used by partic...

Background Not being in employment, education, or training (NEET) is associated with poor health (physical and mental) and social exclusion. We investigated whether England’s statutory school readiness measure conducted at 4–5 years provides a risk signal for NEET in late adolescence. Methods We identified 8,118 individuals with school readiness m...

Human sensorimotor decision making has a tendency to get ‘stuck in a rut’, being biased towards selecting a previously implemented action structure (hysteresis). Existing explanations propose this is the consequence of an agent efficiently modifying an existing plan, rather than creating a new plan from scratch. Instead, we propose that hysteresis...

Background: Adolescence and transition into adulthood are periods shaping life-long mental health, cardiometabolic risk, and inequalities. However, they are poorly studied and understood. By extending and expanding the Born in Bradford (BiB) cohort study through this period using innovative, co-produced approaches to collect and analyse data, we a...

Objective To describe early educational attainment and special educational needs (SEN) provision in children with major congenital anomaly (CA) compared with peers. Design Analysis of educational data linked to the ongoing Born in Bradford cohort study. Confounders were identified via causal inference methods and multivariable logistic regression...

Background Educational attainment in children with congenital heart disease (CHD) within the UK has not been reported, despite the possibility of school absences and disease-specific factors creating educational barriers. Methods Children were prospectively recruited to the Born in Bradford birth cohort between March 2007 and December 2010. Diagno...

Background Air pollution harms health across the life course. Children are at particular risk of adverse effects during development, which may impact on health in later life. Interventions that improve air quality are urgently needed both to improve public health now, and prevent longer-term increased vulnerability to chronic disease. Low Emission...

Objective To investigate at a population level whether England’s universal assessment of ‘school readiness’ is associated with later identification of special educational needs (SEN). Also, whether ethnic differences exist in SEN identification (white British versus ethnic minority) and whether this varies as a function of school readiness. Method...

Sensory feedback plays a critical role in motor control and motor learning, with both processes adjusting outgoing motor commands relative to the error between actual sensory feedback and the predictions of a forward model. However, models of motor control rarely specify the exact nature of these predictions. We hypothesized that large differences...

Video games present a unique opportunity to study motor skill. First-person shooter (FPS) games have particular utility because they require visually-guided hand movements that are similar to widely studied planar reaching tasks. However, there is a need to ensure the tasks are equivalent if FPS games are to yield their potential as a powerful scie...

Objectives Covid-19 shone a spotlight on the poor air quality present in many classrooms and led to multiple calls for Air Cleaning Technologies (ACT) in schools. This is understandable given the ability of these technologies to remove or inactivate airborne viruses (via filtration or UVC light respectively). However, there is little knowledge abou...

Video games present a unique opportunity to study motor skill. First-person shooter (FPS) games have particular utility because they require visually-guided hand movements that are similar to widely studied planar reaching tasks. However, there is a need to ensure the tasks are equivalent if FPS games are to yield their potential as a powerful scie...

The richness of linked population data provides exciting opportunities to understand local health needs, identify and predict those in most need of support and evaluate health interventions. There has been extensive investment to unlock the potential of clinical data for health research in the UK. However, most of the determinants of our health are...

Seasonal changes in the measured CO2 levels at four schools are herein presented through a set of indoor air quality metrics that were gathered during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. Data from non-intrusive environmental monitoring units were remotely collected throughout 2021 from 36 naturally ventilated classrooms at two primary sc...

Consumer virtual reality (VR) systems are increasingly being deployed in research to study sensorimotor behaviors, but properties of such systems require verification before being used as scientific tools. The 'motion-to-photon' latency (the lag between a user making a movement and the movement being displayed within the display) is a particularly...

Introduction We assessed upper limb function in people with progressive MS (pwPMS) using a novel kinematic 3D motion capture methodology. Methods 42 pwPMS and 15 healthy controls reached-and-grasped different objects while movement trajectories were captured with a kinematic assessment system. Clinical measures included the nine hole peg test (9HP...

Consumer virtual reality (VR) systems are increasingly being deployed in research to study sensorimotor behaviours, but properties of such systems require verification before being used as scientific tools. The ‘motion-to-photon’ latency (the lag between a user making a movement and the movement being displayed within the display) is a particularly...

Background: Socio-economic, cultural and environmental conditions strongly affect health across the life course. Local government plays a key role in influencing these wider determinants of health and levels of inequality within their communities. However, they lack the research infrastructure and culture that would enable them to develop an eviden...

Inhibition can be implemented reactively, withholding movement in response to a stop-signal, or by proactive changes to movement planning when a stop-signal is expected. Previous studies have typically employed simple button presses, finding proactive delays to movement onset when a stop-signal might appear. Here, we consider inhibition in the cont...

Objective To describe the prevalence of factors related to well-being among primary school children in a deprived multiethnic community in the UK. Design and participants Cross-sectional survey of 15 641 children aged 7–10 years in Born in Bradford’s Primary School Years study: whole-classroom samples in 89 Bradford primary schools between 2016 an...

We previously linked interceptive timing performance to mathematics attainment in 5-11-year-old children, which we attributed to the neural overlap between spatiotemporal and numerical operations. This explanation implies the relationship should persist through the teenage years, so we extended our investigation to adolescents (n = 200, 11-15 years...

Losing a point in tennis could result from poor shot selection or faulty stroke execution. To explore how the brain responds to these different types of errors, we examined feedback-locked EEG activity while participants completed a modified version of a standard three-armed bandit probabilistic reward task. Our task framed unrewarded outcomes as t...

The richness of linked population data provides exciting opportunities to understand local health needs, identify and predict those in most need of support and evaluate health interventions. There has been extensive investment to unlock the potential of clinical data for health research in the UK. However, most of the determinants of our health are...

Background The urban environment may influence neurodevelopment from conception onwards, but there is no evaluation of the impact of multiple groups of exposures simultaneously. We investigated the association between early-life urban environment and cognitive and motor function in children. Methods We used data from 5403 mother–child pairs from f...

Developmental dyslexia affects around 5-15% of the population and has a heterogeneous aetiology. Optometric disorders are more prevalent in dyslexic populations but the relationship be- tween eye movement control and dyslexia is not well established. In this study, we investigated whether children with dyslexia show saccadic or fixation deficits an...

Purpose Many people experience unilateral degraded vision, usually owing to a developmental or age-related disorder. There are unresolved questions regarding the extent to which such unilateral visual deficits impact on sensorimotor performance; an important issue as sensorimotor limitations can constrain quality of life by restricting ‘activities...

Background: Socio-economic, cultural and environmental conditions strongly affect health across the life course. Local government plays a key role in influencing these wider determinants of health and levels of inequality within their communities. However, they lack the research infrastructure and culture that would enable them to develop an eviden...

Background: Socio-economic, cultural and environmental conditions strongly affect health across the life course. Local government plays a key role in influencing these wider determinants of health and levels of inequality within their communities. However, they lack the research infrastructure and culture that would enable them to develop an eviden...

Background In England, the onset of COVID-19 and a rapidly increasing infection rate resulted in a lockdown (March-June 2020) which placed strict restrictions on movement of the public, including children. Using data collected from children living in a multi-ethnic city with high levels of deprivation, this study aimed to: (1) report children’s sel...

In light of recent advances in technology, there has been growing interest in virtual reality (VR) simulations for training purposes in a range of high-performance environments, from sport to nuclear decommissioning. For a VR simulation to elicit effective transfer of training to the real-world, it must provide a sufficient level of validity, that...

This study examined the predictive validity of holistic school readiness evaluations using the ‘good level of development’ outcome from the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP). The EYFSP assesses a range of abilities at school entry including academic, language, socio-emotional, and motor skills. In particular, we examined whether the asse...

There are an abundance of digital simulation technologies available to support the delivery of dental education, but questions of how to best use these systems to maximize pedagogical benefit abound. To better understand the state-of-art, dental educators from across Europe were invited to a workshop in Leeds, England to reflect on how they use sim...

Evidence suggests that children struggle to acquire age-appropriate fundamental movement skills (FMS), despite their importance for facilitating physical activity. This has led to calls for routine school-based screening of children's FMS. However, there is limited research exploring schools' capacity to conduct such assessments. This study investi...

Epidemiological studies mostly focus on single environmental exposures. This study aims to systematically assess associations between a wide range of prenatal and childhood environmental exposures and cognition. The study sample included data of 1,298 mother-child pairs, children were 6-11 years-old, from six European birth cohorts. We measured 87...

Background A large proportion of children are not able to perform age-appropriate fundamental movement skills (FMS). Thus, it is important to assess FMS so that children needing additional support can be identified in a timely fashion. There is great potential for universal screening of FMS in schools, but research has established that current asse...

Background It was hypothesized that preparing for a surgical procedure, taking into account individual patient characteristics, may facilitate the procedure and improve surgical quality. The aim of this study was to compare different case-specific, preoperative mental rehearsal methods before minimally invasive rectal cancer surgery. Methods In th...

Background In England, the onset of COVID-19 and a rapidly increasing infection rate resulted in a lockdown (March-June 2020) which placed strict restrictions on movement of the public, including children. Using data collected from children living in a multi-ethnic city with high levels of deprivation, this study aimed to: (1) report childrens self...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1098/rsos.160806.][This corrects the article DOI: 10.1098/rsos.160806.].

This study examined the predictive validity of holistic school readiness evaluations using the ‘good level of development’ outcome from the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP). The EYFSP assesses a range of abilities at school entry including academic, language, socio-emotional, and motor skills. In particular, we examined whether the asse...

Introduction: Air pollution harms health across the life course. Children are at particular risk of adverse effects during development, which may impact on health in later life. Interventions that improve air quality are therefore urgently needed not only to improve public health now, but to prevent longer-term increased vulnerability to chronic di...

Background Hand rehabilitation is core to helping stroke survivors regain activities of daily living. Recent studies have suggested that the use of electroencephalography-based brain-computer interfaces (BCI) can promote this process. Here, we report the first systematic examination of the literature on the use of BCI-robot systems for the rehabili...

Objectives This was a pilot study to explore whether the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP) carried out by UK teachers within the ‘reception’ year, combined with the Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ), can lead to early identification of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and early access to intervention and can reduce in...

Objective To describe the prevalence of factors related to wellbeing among primary school children in a deprived multi-ethnic community. Design and participants Cross-sectional survey of 15,641 children aged 7-10 years in Born in Bradford’s Primary School Years study: whole-classroom samples in 89 Bradford primary schools between 2016 and 2019. M...

The COVID-19 crisis has fundamentally transformed the healthcare training and education landscape, resulting in a desperate need for a system-wide exploration of scalable, flexible, user-friendly and resilient solutions that mitigate the long-term impact on the development of a skilled healthcare workforce that can deliver high-quality patient care...

Background Maternal iodine requirements increase during pregnancy to supply thyroid hormones essential for fetal brain development. Maternal iodine deficiency can lead to hypothyroxinemia, a reduced fetal supply of thyroid hormones which, in the first trimester, has been linked to an increased risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the child. No...

Background Studies looking at associations between environmental chemicals and child behaviour usually consider only one exposure or family of exposures. Objective This study explores associations between prenatal exposure to a wide range of environmental chemicals and child behaviour. Methods We studied 708 mother-child pairs from five European...

Background: Maternal iodine requirements increase during pregnancy to supply thyroid hormones essential for fetal brain development. Maternal iodine deficiency can lead to hypothyroxinemia, a reduced fetal supply of thyroid hormones which, in the first trimester, has been linked to an increased risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the child. N...

We describe the development of an evidence-based motor intervention and an implementation pilot study in ten primary schools, involving 515 children (4–11 years). ‘Helping Handwriting SHINE’ (HHS) is a novel, school-led, group-based handwriting intervention. Teaching staff delivered HHS and provided feedback through a questionnaire, reporting that:...

Objective Investigations into surgical expertise have almost exclusively focused on overt behavioral characteristics with little consideration of the underlying neural processes. Recent advances in neuroimaging technologies, for example, wireless, wearable scalp-recorded electroencephalography (EEG), allow an insight into the neural processes gover...

Upper limb dysfunction is common in progressive forms of multiple sclerosis (MS) leading to increased dependency and reduced quality of life. Clinicians and researchers need tailored outcome measures to quantify upper limb dysfunction, and evaluate potential deterioration or intervention efficacy. Current assessments rely on coarse measures and sub...

Background: Maternal iodine requirements increase during pregnancy to supply thyroid hormones critical for fetal neurodevelopment. Iodine insufficiency may result in poorer cognitive or child educational outcomes but current evidence is sparse and inconsistent. Objectives: To quantify the association between maternal iodine status and child educ...

Background Fundamental Movement Skills (FMS) play a critical role in ontogenesis. Many children have insufficient FMS, highlighting the need for universal screening in schools. There are many observational FMS assessment tools, but their psychometric properties are not readily accessible. A systematic review was therefore undertaken to compile evid...

Objective: The ability to simulate procedures in silico has transformed surgical training and practice. Today's simulators, designed for the training of a highly specialized set of procedures, also present a powerful scientific tool for understanding the neural control processes that underpin the learning and application of surgical skills. Here,...

Background: Trigeminal neuralgia (TN) is an orofacial condition defined by reoccurring, spontaneous, short-lived but excruciating stabbing pain. Pharmacological interventions constitute the first-line treatment for TN, with antiepileptic drugs commonly prescribed. People treated for TN pain with antiepileptic drugs describe cognitive and motor dif...