Meet the Team
Here you can learn more about the researchers that contributed to the research and this resource.
Dr Aisling Mulvihill
Postdoctoral Researcher, The University of Queensland
Aisling's research activities include social cognition and self-regulation from early childhood to adolescence.
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She has extensive clinical expertise in supporting children with learning and social-emotional challenges relating to Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and Developmental Language Disorder (DLD).
Alicia Mixter
Undergraduate Researcher, King's College London
Alicia is completing a BSc in Psychology alongside working as a research assistant. Their research investigates how others’ minds are represented, and the potential factors underlying individual differences in the ability to infer mental states.
Dr Bryony Payne
Postdoctoral Researcher, King's College London
Bryony's research examines how people mentally represent what is ‘self’, what is ‘other’ and, critically, how these representations are influenced by the interactions between the society, culture, and language that people are exposed to.
Dr Caroline Catmur
Lecturer and Researcher, King's College London
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Caroline teaches and carries out research into how the brain performs social interaction, including empathy and mental state understanding. The best part of her job is supervising and working with really smart people, like everyone on this page, helping them carry out the best research they can do.
Callyn Farrell
PhD candidate, University of Queensland
Callyn’s research examines how gender socialisation in early childhood is shaped through adult-child interactions, language, and toy preferences. His work focuses on both binary and gender-diverse children, showing that adults use less elaborated language with gender-neutral children, potentially impacting development. Beyond socialisation, Callyn is interested in the Arts' role in mental health and in fostering inclusion for children with developmental differences.
Emily L. Long
Doctoral Researcher, University of Oxford
Emily's research focuses on how we infer others' mental states, such as beliefs and intentions. They study the way in which these inferences are affected by how we perceive a person's traits, such as their personality or cognitive ability.
Prof Geoff Bird
Associate Professor, University College London
Geoff's work focuses on people's theory of mind and empathy in both neurotypical and autistic populations. Their research interests also include Alexithymia (a sub-clinical condition characterised by an inability to identify and describe one's own emotions) and interoception (the perception of the state of the body).
Lorenzo Cappiello
Doctoral Researcher, King's College London
Lorenzo's research interests are in Social Cognition, Psycholinguistics, and Mental Health in educational settings.
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Leora Sevi
Doctoral Researcher, University of Oxford
Leora is interested in how we understand other people's characteristics and their emotional states. Their research examines how the two relate and why abilities might differ across people and depending on the person being interpreted.
Mariza Stagaki
Trainee Clinical Psychologist, King's College London
Mariza's research interests lie in mentalising, attachment, childhood trauma as well as the relationship between the body, the mind, and somatic-related disorders.
She is passionate about trauma-informed approaches, the power-threat meaning framework and empowering individuals from minoritised backgrounds to become equal partners in research co-production and their journey towards recovery.
Dr Mirta Stantić
Assistant Professor, Royal Holloway,
University of London
Mirta's research focuses on our visual system’s ability to recognise people from their faces, and its remarkable occasional failures to do so. They focus on individual differences in face perception and face memory across populations. They're interested in finding out what makes it possible for us to learn faces and how this might differ across people. Further, what interventions might help those who struggle with face processing, like people with autism and prosopagnosia, to improve their ability.
Prof Virginia Slaughter
Professor of Psychology, The University of Queensland
Founder of the Early Cognitive Development Centre.
Virginia's research focuses on social and cognitive development in infants and young children, with particular emphasis on social behaviour in infancy, theory-of-mind development and the acquisition of peer interaction skills. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.
Dr Zoë Pounder
Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Oxford
Zoë's research has investigated the nature and individual variation of an experience known as aphantasia - the inability to generate voluntary visual imagery. How far individuals differ in their mental imagery experience is of key interest. More recently, Zoë's research has focused on how we model other people's minds to improve our understanding of them.
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