I am interested in the development of social communication skills in children, both typically developing and those with complex communication needs (e.g. autism, severe cerebral palsy). I have studied the development of joint attention skills (the ability to share attention with others, for example by following others’ gaze) and also more general cognitive processes that might influence communication (e.g. with PhD students in my lab - proposing an ‘increased perceptual capacity’ in autism and individual differences in biological motion perception). I have also studied attention and face processing in relation to social communication, including in autistic children who are deaf.

With colleagues at Great Ormond Street Hospital and San Francisco State University we have recently been studying communication skills in non-verbal children with severe cerebral palsy affecting all four limbs. We have looked at the role of joint attention in eye pointing for communication, created an assessment for functional gaze control, worked on a screening tool for visual impairment and developed an eye-pointing classification system for clinical use.

I am also interested in the development of social communication and cognition in typically developing children. Recently I have been exploring how and when young children are able to represent two alternative future outcomes from a single event. Children appear to develop this skill at around the same time that they begin to be able to represent their own true belief and another's false belief about a single event (a key feature of theory of mind). Students in my lab are exploring whether there is a link between these two important cognitive milestones.