Research

Can you briefly describe your research area?
My main aim is to find out how people with autism see and understand the world, and why they find some things (e.g. social interaction) so hard, but are brilliant at others (e.g. noticing and remembering exact details).

What do the different members of your team do?
The research assistants who work with me help design experiments, make the test materials, recruit children with autism and comparison groups without autism, and go out and test the children. Together we try to come up with new hypotheses about how the minds of people with autism may be special, we try to think how to test these ideas, and we analyse and write up our findings. From these findings, we start hypothesizing all over again.

In what ways do members of your team come up with new ideas?
We learn most from seeing and spending time with children and adults with autism. Talking to their parents also teaches us a lot. We learn, too, from trial and error if an experiment doesn't work in the way we expected, that might teach us more than if it had worked.

What qualities do you think are needed to solve a scientific problem?
Creativity, patience, persistence, humility and the ability to learn from your failures.

What do you do if your experiment doesn't work?
Think about why it didn't work, every finding tells you something if you can think about it laterally.

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