About
I am a post-doctoral researcher in Birgit Elsner’s Research Group on Developmental Psychology at the University of Potsdam. In my research, I am particularly interested in the interaction between infants’ motor abilities and development and their contribution to infants’ social development. The theoretical foundations of my work heavily draw on philosophical and psychological work on embodied, ecological, extended and enacted perspectives on human cognition.
As part of my position in Potsdam, I also teach Bachelor and Master’s Level seminars on infants’ understanding of social signals, comparative approaches to language acquisition and evolution and 4E-cognition approaches to human development.
Prior to coming to Potsdam, I held a post-doctoral research position with at the University of Mainz and the LMU München at Nicole Altvater-Mackensen’s Wortakrobaten laboratory. As part of the Crossing the Borders collaboration we investigated children’s understanding of linguistic and action sequences.
From 2019—2021, I also lectured in General Cognitive Psychology (Allgemeine Psychologie) at Sigmund Freud University Berlin.
In 2019, I completed my PhD on infants’ understanding and use of ostensive signals in interpreting others’ behaviour at Lancaster University. I was supervised by Eugenio Parise, Vincent Reid and Anna Theakston. My PhD was funded by Lancaster University and The ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development. During my final year of my PhD, I visited Stephanie Hoehl’s Early Social Cognition research group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, where I worked as a research assistant collecting EEG- and behavioural data with 6—20month old infants.
From 2013-2014, I worked at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Psychology and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences as a research assistant, supporting studies on children’s social and communicative abilities.
In 2012, I completed my Master of Science in Evolution of Language and Cognition (Linguistics) at the University of Edinburgh. In 2011, I graduated from the University of Glasgow with a Master of Arts (Social Sciences) in Psychology. In my pre-honours, I also took courses on Politics and Central & East European Studies, for which I have an ongoing interest.
I have a keen interest in open science and advanced statistical models, in particular mixed effects models and using Bayes Factors.