Cognition in Complex Environments

The Cognitive Neuroscience group are researchers whose work spans across perception, memory, language, and action.

Collectively, we are interested in understanding the functional and neural mechanisms that support mind and behaviour. Our goal is to understand human cognition in complex and dynamic real-world scenarios. We pursue this by taking some research out of the laboratory and into the real world using a diverse set of research methods – combining multiple physiological measures.

Find out more about our Centre for Mobile Cognition.

We are motivated by the belief that the future of Psychology lies in multi-disciplinary and impact-oriented research, underpinned by strong theory, rich data and powerful computational analysis. We are confident that basic research and impact go naturally together, and that high-quality research investigating complex naturalistic behaviour provides exciting opportunities to develop and test psychological theories.

In the early years of childhood, children undergo crucial changes in their perceptual, motor, cognitive, and social abilities. By systematically testing and observing these changes we aim to gain understanding of what stimulates and what constrains child development in these different domains.

Such understanding is of vital importance to determine: (a) how we can promote optimal health and wellbeing for all children; (b) how we can ensure that all children thrive in education and beyond; and (c) how inequalities in child development outcomes can be reduced. Our research provides an invaluable window on the structure and origins of human cognition and the applications of this knowledge to improving children’s lives, thereby supporting the development of evidence-based interventions and theory.

Psychology at the University of Stirling has a long history of excellence in developmental research. We have our own in-house Kindergarten and specialist lifespan research laboratory.

The University of Stirling also has a research group dedicated to autism research: the Stirling Autism Research (STAR) Lab.

Research projects past and present

ARED Project

Funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

The Agency, Rationality and Epistemic Defeat (ARED) project aims to explore the origins of human rational thought by comparing how infants, dogs, and pigs form and revise their beliefs. ARED is an interdisciplinary research project between philosophy (Dr Giacomo Melis), developmental psychology (Dr Eva Rafetseder & Dr Kirsten Blakey) and animal cognition, in collaboration with the Messerli Research Institute.

Illustrating Adventurous Play

Funded by the Froebel Trust.

In this seed project, Dr Lily FitzGibbon will use a participatory approach to develop and validate a new pictorial self-report measure of adventurous play for use with 3- to 7-year-olds, an age-group whose viewpoint is rarely taken in quantitative play research. This new measure will form the critical lynchpin for further research advancing understanding of the role of adventurous play for children’s health, wellbeing, and learning.

SAND Project

Funded by the Jacobs Foundation & the Leverhulme Trust

In the SAND Project, Dr Eva Rafetseder explores the effects of schooling across neurocognitive development. Entering formal schooling is a major transition in almost every child’s life.

Despite the transformative nature of this experience, most countries adopt a somewhat arbitrary cut-off date to determine when a child will enter school. Many parents face the difficult decision of whether their child should enter school as soon as they're eligible or wait another year. We're a group of developmental psychologists who are interested in finding out about the changes in the brain and in the mind of kids as a result of formal schooling.

It’s Toxic for Girls: A Gendered Experience of Stem Classes in High School

Funded by Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Following a longitudinal, ethnographic study of a cohort of adolescents through their high school experiences; this study led by Dr Carol Jasper offers an insight into the reasons underpinning female exit from STEM roles.

The presentation of vignettes of systemic prejudice and the normalisation of sexism at institutional, classroom, and inter-pupil levels indicates that inequality can be manifest throughout female STEM career trajectories from Secondary schooling onwards.

Stirling has an outstanding record of face research. We study various aspects of face perception and memory, including low level visual processing, adaptation, gaze perception, developmental, mate preference and attractiveness, and mechanisms of recognition. We also cover forensic and neuropsychological aspects such as unfamiliar face matching, eye-witness memory, and identifying markers of covert face recognition (prosopagnosia, concealed face recognition).

We host the face research mailing list and the PICS face database. Find out more about Stirling Face Lab.

Stirling Visual Perception group combines expertise of several academic researchers, each with their autonomous lines of research, which all have the common aim of understanding how the brain processes visual information that enables us to see and interact with the environment. 

Our main research areas include how the human brain processes shape, colour, texture, depth and motion; how we can track and segregate the dynamics of objects moving through everyday visual scenes; how focusing on some elements of visual (and multisensory) scenes affords them a processing advantage and how this focus fluctuates when we engage in a monotonous or demanding task for a while.

Our research approaches span different areas of visual neuroscience including human visual psychophysics, electrophysiology (EEG/ERP), computational approaches, as well as the neuroimaging of brain rhythms, either intrinsic or stimulus-driven, as indicators of cognitive functions, in concert with other physiological markers of one's current state of arousal, wakefulness and vigilance, such as pupil dilation.

The Stirling Autism Research (STAR) team consists of a group of autistic and non-autistic autism researchers based at the University of Stirling, Scotland.

We are passionate about autism research that makes a meaningful difference, and we have a particular focus on wellbeing. We believe that autism research can and should play a positive role in autistic people’s lives, and we acknowledge our responsibility as researchers in the narratives surrounding autism and autistic people.

Stirling Autism Research (STAR) comprises a range of researchers from different disciplines, such as psychology, neuroscience, social work and healthcare. Our aim is to conduct high-quality research, which aims to better understand the strengths and difficulties experienced by autistic people across the lifespan, to improve the quality of autistic people’s lives. Through our growing professional research network, we facilitate collaborations and research across the autism community, and engage in inter-disciplinary research with other universities and service providers.

Our research includes topics such as: mental health, wellbeing (e.g. anxiety, depression) and quality of life (e.g. social integration, everyday functioning, environmental, motivation); minority stress, community connectedness and autistic identity, autism acceptance and stigma, camouflaging, ageing, future thinking (thinking about the future), prospective memory (remembering to remember) and metacognition (thinking about thinking), executive function (e.g. planning, decision making, behaviour regulation).

Find out more about Stirling Autism Research.