Amy joined CRAE in 2025 as a PhD student under the supervision of John Swettenham and Anna Remington, and divides her time between CRAE and UCL’s Department of Language and Cognition.
After completing her BA in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, Amy worked as a Research Assistant at the Kent Child Development Unit (KCDU) within the University of Kent. Here she worked on several projects, including the Keeping Conversations Going project which explored the cognitive factors that make conversation easier or more difficult for autistic and non-autistic children, and the Conversation for Social Interaction project, which involved working with primary school teachers to co-develop a classroom-based programme aimed at strengthening children’s conversation skills.
Amy’s PhD will expand on previous research conducted at CRAE by the SuPer team showing that autistic people experience a bigger perceptual capacity than non-autistic people, meaning that they can take in more information at any given moment. She will explore whether mental health difficulties like anxiety, which are commonly experienced by autistic people, might contribute to differences in perceptual capacity, and further investigate capacity differences in childhood.