Dr Eva Rafetseder

Associate Professor

Psychology University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA

Dr Eva Rafetseder

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About me

Eva Rafetseder is an Associate Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Stirling. Her work focuses on the development of cognitive and brain functions across childhood, with an emphasis on how this development is shaped by environmental factors, such as formal school entry and home environments. Specifically, Rafetseder’s empirical approach focusses on the structure of children's reasoning with possible worlds, how evidence and prior beliefs interact to affect their learning and belief revision, the role of social factors (such as learning from others) in guiding learning and how this learning is embedded within environments (school, home) and shaped by individuals’ experiences. She makes use of both neuroimaging (fNIRS) and multivariate developmental methodology (latent growth curve modelling) to track brain-behaviour relationships over time. Rafetseder received her Ph.D. from the University of Salzburg (Austria) in cognitive development in 2010 working with Prof Josef Perner. She then completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Salzburg with Prof Josef Perner (2010-2013) and the University of Konstanz (Germany) with Prof Wolfgang Spohn (2013). She joined the University of Stirling as a Lecturer in 2013, advancing to Senior Lecturer in 2019 and Associate Professor in 2024. Rafetseder is the recipient of the Mercator Fellowship and the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship.

I am passionate about uncovering the developmental trajectories of children’s thinking and reasoning, thereby advancing our understanding of the cognitive factors that shape how children think about alternative possible worlds, how they revise their beliefs and what range of emotions they experience as a result. My current work builds on this foundation and investigates how inter-individual differences in intra-individual neurocognitive change predicts academic performance, and how contextual factors, such as home life and age at school entry, affect individual learning.

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