Current position

I am currently a post-doc researcher at Institut Jean Nicod (Paris) financed by the Swedish Research Council. My project concerns the relation between social attention and perspective taking abilities in adults.

PhD Thesis

I defended my PhD in 2016.

My thesis concerned interest as a contagious attitude. Our interest in things and events is contagious, in the sense that we become interested in what interests others without reflecting upon this fact. Notably, this typically implies that we focus on the same information as our peers – shared interest leads to shared beliefs. Moreover, and crucially, this form of social sharing of information does not presuppose Theory-of-Mind ability, while nevertheless being a profoundly social phenomenon. I relate this phenomenon to higher level cognitive social understanding, such as understanding false (non-shared) beliefs. How does the social transfer of interest interact with:

• Infants appreciation of others’ diverging perspectives?
• Three-year-olds’ responses in verbal false-belief tasks?

My thesis demonstrated how the social transfer of interest may subserve apparent perspective-taking abilities in both pre-verbal infants and three-year-olds.

Other research interests

• The role of contextual information in social attention
• False-belief tasks, both verbal and non-verbal
• Functional connections among attention, perspective-taking and self-other cognition

I am also interested in the philosophy (particularly ontology) of psychology, and other topics residing in the intersection between philosophy and psychology.
 

Teaching

I intermittently teach research methods, developmental psychology and neuropsychology.