The Cognitive Basis of Social Interaction Across the Lifespan

Heather J. Ferguson is a Professor in Psychology at the University of Kent. She completed her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and Psycholinguistics at the University of Glasgow in 2007, followed by a two-year postdoctoral research position at UCL. Her research examines the cognitive basis of social communication. Professor Ferguson examines the time-course of integration, the underlying neural mechanisms, and the extent to which constraints from world knowledge and context compete to influence social interaction and pragmatic language comprehension. This work has received generous funding, including a European Research Council grant examining social communication across the lifespan, and Leverhulme Trust grants that link social processing to language (including in autism spectrum disorders). She has been recognized through multiple prizes (e.g. Psychonomic Early Career Award 2019), and holds key leadership positions in the discipline (e.g. Honorary Secretary to the Experimental Psychology Society). Elisabeth E.F. Bradford is a Lecturer in Cognitive and Developmental Psychology at the School of Social Sciences, University of Dundee (Scotland, U.K.). She completed her PhD at the University of St Andrews in 2016. Prior to her lectureship at the University of Dundee, Lizzie worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Kent (England, U.K.). Her research focuses on social cognition abilities, examining how these capacities change and develop across the lifespan, the impacts of deficits in social cognition abilities, how social cognition may vary across cultures, and factors that may underlie successful engagement of social cognition abilities at different ages (e.g., executive functions).