In collaboration with Professor Helen Dodd, we wrote the State of Play in Scotland Report for Play Scotland. We synthesised the results of several recent surveys and consultations to deliver a clear and comprehensive set of messages about play in Scotland.

In this new project at the University of Stirling, we are exploring the emotional and motivational aspects of adventurous experiences. More coming soon!

In this UKRI funded project, led by Professor Helen Dodd, we are researching whether children’s adventurous play can decrease levels of anxiety experienced by young people. We suggest that experiencing feelings of uncertainty, thrill, and excitement during play can allow children to develop strategies to cope with uncertain situations. By looking to increase children's opportunities for adventurous play, the quality of life for children could be improved and future mental health issues could be prevented.

Uncertainty can lead to positive and negative emotions. In this project, we seek to determine whether children's trait curiosity and intolerance of uncertainty can predict their emotional responses to situations with high uncertainty. We use cutting-edge online research methods with children to conduct this research remotely. This work is funded by the Experimental Psychology Society and run in collaboration with Professor Helen Dodd and Zoe Ryan.

In an ongoing series of studies I have been investigating children's curiosity and information seeking. What makes children seek more information? How does this differ from adults? Do children learn better when they can choose what to learn?

Sometimes we want to know "what if". In projects in collaboration with Dr Henrike Moll and Professor Kou Murayama, I have shown that children and adults are motivated to learn about what might have happened if they acted differently in the past. Adults will sometimes even pay for the information even though it makes them feel bad.

In this line of work, Kou Murayama, Johnny King L. Lau and I hypothesise that information may have incentive salience properties leading to motivational power beyond expected reward value. Read our opinion article on the topic here.

PhD student, Hannah Stone, applied what we know about the motivational power of curiosity to a novel consumer behaviour - entomophagy, the practise of eating insects.
Read about her results here and here.

I am an expert in designing and conducting online research projects, including with developmental populations. I have organised training sessions for interdisciplinary audiences on how to conduct research online, or with limited space and resources. I focus on the use of free and open source resources for improving the replicability of psychological research.

I am a strong advocate of open research practices. I run the University of Reading's ReproducibiliTea discussion group that provides a forum of skill-sharing and debate about Open Research. I have also written and delivered open research training for the University of Reading's Graduate School.

In the summer of 2018 I held a 6 week residency in the Science Museum in London as part of their Live Science programme. More than 1500 museum visitors took part in our 'Understanding Curiosity' research and learned about what makes people feel curious. Our Forbidden Fruit study includes data from this project.

In the Summer of 2021, in response to ongoing restrictions on children's lives during the coronavirus pandemic, I was involved in setting up the Summer of Play campaign. In collaboration with Save the Children and Play England, we campaigned for children's right to fun, friends, and freedom.

I regularly deliver talks about my research and careers in psychology to school students. For example, I took part in Farnborough 6th Form College's Psychology Week in 2018, 2019, and 2020.