Sarah leads the Developmental Diversity Group at the ICN. Her research is concerned with understanding how the autistic mind processes and represents information, with a particular focus on mentalizing. She’s especially interested in how these cognitive differences might affect other aspects of cognition and mental health in autism, and whether mentalizing can be modulated by changes to the social environment in order to better support autistic people.

Sarah is an Associate Professor at the ICN and holds a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship. She previously held independent research fellowships from the British Academy and jointly from the Medical Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council. She is also a Chartered Psychologist, and received the 2014 Neil O’Connor Award from the British Psychological Society. Sarah studied for her PhD at UCL with Uta Frith and Elisabeth Hill, and as an undergraduate in Psychology and Physiology at Oxford University.

Sarah studies cognitive differences in the autistic mind through the lifespan, using neuropsychological tasks, eye-tracking and neuroimaging techniques. She’s interested in the universality, specificity and sufficiency of mentalizing differences in explaining autistic characeristics, and whether implicit mentalizing difficulties can account for the specific profile of differences in other domains too – lying, laughter, smiles, future thinking, executive function, mental health… to name a few. Most recently, Sarah has turned to studying factors that can increase mentalizing in autism, especially culture, bilingualism, gender, and intergroup bias. The ultimate aim is to understand autism better in order that evidence-based support can be developed that targets the source and makes a real difference.