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

Such understanding is of vital importance to determine (a) why some children face problems in their development and (b) how these problems can be treated using evidence-based practice, as well as providing an invaluable window to basic understanding of the structure and origins of fully-developed human cognition. 

Psychology at the University of Stirling has a long history of excellence in developmental research.

We are concerned with several questions:

• How do children distinguish good intentions from bad intentions?
• How do they know what other people believe and want?
• How do children learn language?
• When do children start to experience complex emotions, such as regret and relief?
• How do children process faces?
• At what age do prospective memory (remembering to remember) and episodic future thinking (thinking about oneself in the future) develop in very young children and are these skills affected by the burgeoning use of technology in modern life?
• What can we learn about the typical development of children and their cognitive processes, compared to neurodiverse children (e.g., Autistic children or children with dyslexia).
• What role does curiosity play in children’s learning and wellbeing?
• How does children’s play support their wellbeing?

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.

The Stirling Face Lab studies face perception across the lifespan, including face memory and mechanisms of face recognition. We examine how people form first impressions and evaluate attractiveness, including mate preferences.

We specialise in forensic and applied domains such as unfamiliar face matching, eyewitness memory, and research on deceptive eyewitnesses using multimodal implicit markers of recognition. We also investigate neurodivergent differences in face processing, including autism, ADHD, and prosopagnosia.

We host the face research mailing list and the PICS face database. The four-star REF impact EvoFIT facial composite system was developed at Stirling Face Lab by Peter Hancock and Charlie Frowd.

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, neuromorphic vision 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.