People

Meet the academic staff who work in the Research Centre for Clinical, Social and Cognitive Neuroscience and discover their research interests and activities.

You can find out more about each member of staff, including their latest publications and their contact details by following the links below.

Members

Dr Anne-Kathrin Fett

Centre Co-Director, Reader in Biological and Clinical Psychology

Dr Fett's research uses psychological, epidemiological and neuroscience approaches to study the mechanisms that underlie different aspects of social functioning, such as loneliness and social isolation, in the general population and in individuals with psychotic disorders and other mental health conditions.

Professor Tina Forster

Centre Co-Director, Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience

Professor Forster researches the brain processes that underlie perception of ones body by using electroencephalography (EEG) to track changes of electrical brain activity.

Dr Danai Dima

Centre Co-Director, Professor of Psychology

Dr Dima's research focuses on the study of cognition and psychosis, mainly employing neuroimaging methods and connectivity analyses in combination with genetics.

Professor Sebastian Gaigg

Head of Psychology

Dr Gaigg's research seeks to inform how best to promote the quality of life of autistic children, adolescents and adults. Part of his research focuses on understanding learning and memory processes across the autism spectrum, with a view to inform strategies for fostering successful learning.

Professor Emmanuel Pothos

Professor of Psychology

Professor Pothos' research interests are in the fields of decision making and reasoning, learning processes and attentional biases in clinical and health psychology. He has worked with a range of computational frameworks for cognitive modelling, including ones based on information theory, flexible representation spaces, Bayesian methods and, more recently, quantum theory.

Dr Kielan Yarrow

Reader in Psychology

Dr Yarrow's research interests include multisensory perception (particularly temporal perception), attention, decision making, and action.

Anna Lambrechts

Lecturer in Psychology

Anna Lambrechts is a cognitive neuroscientist. Her current work explores the temporal dynamics of communication in ASD. In addition, she investigates learning and reward processing in autistic children and adults who present complex needs such as learning difficulties and language delays.

Dr Elliot Freeman

Reader of Psychology

Dr Freeman's current research focusses on how people differ in their ability to put sight and sound together. His methods are primarily behavioural (psychophysics), but he has also worked on projects involving functional and anatomical fMRI, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and EEG. He is also beginning to experiment with transcranial electrical stimulation.

Dr Beatriz Calvo Merino

Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience

Professor Calvo-Merino's current research investigates the sensorimotor neural and cognitive underpinnings of aesthetic perception of performing arts, in particular dance.

Dr Lauren Knott

Reader of Psychology

Dr Knott's research focusses on the formation of recollective errors in memory, understanding factors that impact error formation, in particular the emotional saliency of information encoded and the length of time between exposure and recollection.

Dr Corinna Haenschel

Professor of Psychology

Dr Haenschel's research interest is in applying behavioural measures, neurophysiological techniques and functional imaging during cognitive tasks in both normal and clinical populations. Recently, she has been particularly interested in the importance of early stimulus encoding on visual working memory performance.

Dr Sophie Lind

Reader in Psychology

Dr Lind's Research interests lie in developmental psychology, developmental disorders (particularly autism spectrum disorder), memory (particularly episodic and autobiographical memory), future-oriented thinking, theory of mind, metacognition, self-awareness, spatial navigation and executive function.

Dr Marie Poirier

Reader in Psychology

Dr Poirier's research interests are in the area of human memory. Current interests include memory over the short term, the role of memory in evaluating past experiences, and the determinants of successful retrieval - as well as memory in special populations.

Professor Dermot Bowler

Professor of Psychology

Professor Bowler's research interests focus on memory in people from the high functioning end of the autism spectrum, and have been generously supported by the Medical Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Nuffield foundation and Autism Speaks.

Dr Ansgar Endress

Senior Lecturer in Psychology

Dr Ansgar Endress is a behavioural scientist with key contributions in fields from evolutionary behavioural science to language acquisition to memory processes to social behaviour. Dr Endress is interested in how seemingly simple psychological mechanisms shared with other animals shape human-specific traits such as language.

Dr Francesco Rigoli

Reader in Psychology

Dr. Rigoli's current research examines the psychological processes underlying broad cultural phenomena such as in politics and in religion. These areas are investigated adopting a multidisciplinary approach integrating computational modelling, cognitive neuroscience, and sociology.

Dr Mehdi Keramati

Lecturer in Psychology

Dr Keramati's Research interests include neuroeconomics and behavioural economics, associative learning, planning, and decision making, artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, and drug and food addiction.

Dr Andreas Jarvstad

Senior Lecturer in Psychology

Dr Jarvstad's work is on learning, inference and decision-making - across a wide range of domains.

Dr Carsten Allefeld

Lecturer in Psychology

Dr Allefeld is a cognitive neuroscientist with a background in physics and philosophy. His research is about developing and improving statistical models and data analysis methods for neuroimaging (EEG, fMRI) and behavioural data. His work tries to make concepts of physics, nonlinear dynamics, systems theory, and information theory fruitful for cognitive neuroscience and psychology. He is particularly interested in the relation between neural and mental states.

Dr Dean D’Souza

Lecturer in Developmental Psychology (Research and Education)

Dr D'Souza is interested in typical and atypical neurocognitive development. He is particularly interested in understanding how early language and cognitive abilities emerge in typically and atypically developing populations, across domains, modalities, and levels of description, over developmental time.

Dr Dimitrios Pinotsis

Reader in Psychology

Dr Pinotsis' recent work exploits deep neural networks and hierarchical Bayesian inference to understand the causes of neurological and psychiatric disorders. He also exploits brain recordings to build better artificial intelligence algorithms.

Dr Lucia Garrido

Senior Lecturer in Psychology

Dr Garrido's research areas include cognitive neuroscience, visual perception, and social perception. Her research attempts to shed light on the perceptual mechanisms that we use in our social interactions. She is interested in how we use information from faces and voices to recognise who someone is, to infer their emotional and mental states, and to decide how we should act towards them.

Dr Paul Bretherton

Psychology Technician

Dr. Bretherton’s research mainly focusses on the study of the neural mechanics of human visual system, with a particular focus on Attention, Perception, Memory, and Learning. A secondary interest is the impact that stress and emotion have on cognitive performance, particularly Attention, Perception, Memory and Learning.

Professor Mark Howe

Professor of Psychology

Professor Howe's research interests are in adaptive memory and its development, autobiographical memory, false memory, false memory priming of problem solving, mathematical and computational models of memory, reasoning, and their development, memory development in children and adults, memory and emotion, memory and the law, and memory in traumatised and maltreated children

Dr Andreas Kappes

Senior Lecturer in Psychology

Dr Kappes is interested in how the unavoidable uncertainty in all our social decisions affects our behaviour, how and when we are influenced by others, and how we learn about ourselves and others. He has a strong interest in evidence-based policy, especially in relation to infectious diseases and pandemics.