Led by Ceci, in collaboration with Sarah, Dr Nadine Lavan, Prof Sophie Scott and many others, the Vocal Communication Project explores how autistic and non-autistic adults experience, perceive and produce laughter and other vocal expressions, interpret human and AI-generated vocal emotions, and use vocal signals in everyday social interactions.
Funded by UCL’s GEO, this study aims to study cognitive differences in autism, within the Pakistani population.
In this project, we will investigate the effect of inter-group bias on spontaneous mentalizing in autistic and non-autistic people. We’re interested in whether we can modulate mentalizing by changing the social environment.
Investigating the ‘Triple I Hypothesis’ – an inability to infer implicit instructions (White, 2013), this project aims to explore the role of implicit mentalizing in executive function difficulties experienced by autistic individuals within open-ended executive function tasks.
Deception is ever-present in day-to-day life, and this project aims to investigate how the ability to detect deception develops over time and if this ability might be an area of difficulty for autistic individuals.
The M&C Project aims to explore mental state decoding and reasoning, the possibilities of modulating mentalizing performance, the role of compensation and its outcomes on mental health in individuals with various degrees of autistic traits.
90% of autistic adults report that sensory issues cause significant barriers at school and work (Leekam et al., 2007). Wearable technologies (e.g., smart glasses) offer the possibility to monitor environments and adjust user-experiences. This project proposes applying such technologies to reduce anxiety-inducing distractions and create prompts that may increase autistic adults’ attentional-focus and quality-of-life.