Juliet Dunstone

I currently work as a research assistant on the Climate in Mind project at the University of Stirling with Dr Sharon Kessler, Dr Clare Andrews and Professor Lena Dominelli. I am researching the impact of climate cafes and climate action workshops on people's emotional resilience to the climate crisis and motivation to take positive climate action. 

I have previously worked as a Leverhulme funded post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Birmingham. I work with Prof. Ian Apperly on a project about the  underlying causes and  consequences of  intuitive alignment, and as a post-doctoral research assistant at the University of Edinburgh, investigating the evolution of lingusitic complexity with Prof. Kenny Smith. 

I completed my Psychology PhD in 2020 with the ERC-funded RATCHETCOG research group at the University of Stirling, UK.  My background is in linguistics and cultural evolution, with an undergraduate degree in English Language from the University of Newcastle and an MSc in the Evolution of Language and Culture from the University of Edinburgh. 

My  PhD research was on the cognitive requirements for cumulative culture in human adults, with a focus on cognition, metacognition and executive functions. I specifically researched whether explicit awareness of own knowledge, and access to explicit executive function resources, has an impact on social and individual learning strategies. I investigated this by conducting experiments both in the lab and in public places where participants attempt to outperform a computer in a visual search task at the same time as having to complete a distractor task that taxes their executive functions. I worked as part of an interdisciplinary team comparing the cognitive abilities of human adults, human children and non-human primates.  

I have also been one of the co-organisers of the Culture Conference.

Outside of academia I am a member of the media and spokesperson team for the campaign to stop the Rosebank oil field and I am a writer, editor, and social media contributor for Curious.Earth.