Presentation

I am a cognitive psychologist who studies how people achieve mutual understanding and coordinate their behaviour. My research investigates the mechanisms through which this social understanding translates into effective social skills.

Current Project

I was recently awarded an Huo Early Career Fellowship (+£345,000) from the Huo Family Foundation for my project Digital Minds in Development. This longitudinal study investigates how adolescents’ social media use shapes their ability to build and maintain social relationships, with a particular focus on the cognitive mechanisms (i.e., executive functions and mindreading) that mediate these effects. I will study this research topic with Dr. Rory Devine.

Past Projects

I contributed to an MRC-funded project led by Prof. Ian Apperly and Dr. Rory Devine at the University of Birmingham, where we developed a sensitive and theoretically grounded measure of mindreading for adolescents and adults.

I also spent two years as a Leverhulme-funded Research Fellow on a multidisciplinary project exploring intuitive alignment—a novel concept in social cognition that brings together insights from behavioural economics, psycholinguistics, and philosophy of mind.

My PhD research examined how people solve pure coordination games: situations in which individuals must match each other’s decisions without any communication. I developed new measures of social alignment and used a range of analytical approaches to study how children and adults coordinate, both within and across national groups.

My doctoral work was supervised by Prof. Ian Apperly and Dr. Ian Charest, and earlier in my career I was mentored by Prof. Virginia Slaughter and Prof. Julie Henry at the University of Queensland. Across all these projects, I have been driven by a broader interest in mindreading (theory of mind) and how our knowledge shapes the inferences we make about others’ mental states.