Ishita joined the lab in 2017 as a research assistant and completed her PhD in 2023. She studied how deception detection abilities change throughout adolescence and early adult life, and are related to mentalizing, bullying and mental health. She is now writing her experiments up as papers and still collaborates with the DevDivLab on extending her work to younger children.

Ishita investigates how deception production and detection abilities change from late childhood, through adolescence, to early adulthood and how they are related to mentalizing, i.e. the ability of people to attribute mental states such as beliefs, desires and intentions to other individuals and themselves, especially when they are not explicitly aware of doing this. She is particularly interested in investigating whether or not autistic individuals, who have previously been found to struggle with mentalizing, are capable of detecting deception, i.e. when they are being lied to.

Ishita leads the Spotting Lies and Reading Minds: Development of Deception in autism project. Click here to read about it!