Research Overview

As a Research Associate, I am working on a project exploring the associations between adversities experienced in the prenatal period and children’s later cognitive development and educational attainment. The research investigates this via five systematic reviews on the topics maternal stress, malnutrition, teratogens, maternal sleep, and maternal metabolic disorders. Prior to this, my PhD research investigated the relationship between attentional mechanisms and word learning in autistic and neurotypical children. Overall, language delayed autistic children demonstrated similar word learning mechanisms to neurotypical children, but the underlying processes of the two groups were slightly different. In particular, autistic children's word learning was enhanced by the presence of stimuli that belonged to a category of interest, such as animals.