Research

My research interests are in developmental disorders, with autism as the main focus. Much of my work has been concerned with specifying the causal basis of autism at the cognitive level, which led me to work on theory of mind, local processing bias and executive function. For my PhD, I therefore looked at individual performance and heterogeneity within these three areas and related this back to behavioural symptoms. Since then, I’ve been extending this sort of approach through neuroimaging studies as well as further behavioural studies, and trying to uncover the mechanisms underlying each of these cognitive abnormalities. I’m particularly interested in the contrast between implicit and explicit cognitive processes in autism.

Before my PhD, I studied social cognition in autism to try to contrast those aspects that were impaired with those that were intact, which ended up focussing mainly on social stereotypes. I’ve also worked on dyslexia, studying the role of sensorimotor processing in literacy and phonology impairments. This led to an interest in the occurrence of sensorimotor impairments in developmental disorders in general, and literacy and phonology skills in autism.

Current projects