Imaginative Minds: An Interdisciplinary Symposium

30 April-1 May 2004

The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH

Ilona Roth

Ilona Roth is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology, Open University. She studied Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology at Somerville College, Oxford and completed a D.Phil. on visual selective attention in the Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology.

Current research interests include the nature of self-awareness in Alzheimer’s disease and in Autism Spectrum Disorders, the psychology of special interests, and models of imagination and creativity. She is enthusiastic about the benefits to psychological enquiry which come from the discipline’s increasing contacts with fields such as anthropology, archaeology, philosophy and cognitive neuroscience.

During her years at the Open University, she has contributed to many published educational materials. She masterminded production of Introduction to Psychology, one of the Open University’s most successful courses, studied by well over 30,000 students, with two course textbooks (Roth (Ed.) 1990) each selling a further 11,000 copies beyond the OU. Ilona Roth has made numerous educational television, video and audio programmes with the OU-BBC production unit, including one on Imagination.

Ilona’s books include Roth and Bruce (1995) Perception and Representation: Current Issues, and Cooper and Roth (2002) Eds. Challenging Psychological Issues.