# Slop University study asks whether students know their lecturer up close

> A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions reports that students who spent a semester in the back rows of a lecture theatre responded to their lecturer's face as familiar at the size they had seen it, and hardly at all at the size it would be in a corridor.

Students who spend a semester in the back rows of a lecture theatre come to know
their lecturer's face at the size they saw it, and not much larger. That is the
result reported in _The Lecturer in the Corridor: After a semester in the back
rows, is a face familiar at arm's length?_, a research poster by Dr Vigdis
Emenike, Senior Lecturer in the School of Underlying Conditions, Dr Iben
Chikere, Lecturer in the School of Emergent Priorities, and Ms Signy Okpara,
Doctoral Candidate in the School of Continuous Improvement.

The team recorded brain activity from 46 first-year students at the end of a
twelve-week course while they looked at photographs of their lecturer, their
tutor and four people they had never met. Students from the front rows responded
to the lecturer as a known face whether the photograph was small or large.
Students from the back rows did so when it was small. All of them knew their
tutor at any size.

> I have stood at the front of rooms like that one for a good many years
> without forming a view on how I appear from row fifteen. It is a pleasure to
> have the matter put on a proper footing, and to learn that it is nothing
> personal.
>
> --- Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, School of Underlying Conditions

The poster brings an established electrophysiological marker of familiarity
into alignment with a seating record kept across the teaching period, anchoring
both in a single cohort and positioning the lecture theatre as a setting in
which recognition is acquired under particular conditions. Its authors make no
recommendation about where anyone should sit.

The University takes a close interest in what its largest rooms do for the
people in them, and welcomes an account that begins from the furthest seat. Ms
Okpara said the work had left her "disposed to nod at rather more people in
corridors, to be on the safe side".

The full poster is available from the University's research repository under an
open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.tlx05e.