Hilary Richardson
Lecturer
- Psychology
- School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
Contact details
- Email: hilary.richardson@ed.ac.uk
- Web: Lab Website
- Web: Google Scholar page
Address
- Street
-
Room F15, Psychology Building
- City
- 7 George Square, Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9JZ
Availability
I am happy to arrange meetings by appointment. Please e-mail me at hilary.richardson@ed.ac.uk to arrange a convenient day and time.
Background
I earned a BS in Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Science from the University of Michigan and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT (advisor: Dr. Rebecca Saxe). I worked as a postdoctoral research fellow with Dr. Charles Nelson in the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston Children's Hospital & Harvard Medical School. I joined the Psychology division of the School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh in August 2020.
Qualifications
PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience
BS in Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Science
Research summary
As children get older, they acquire new facts, memories and skills, build and revise intuitive theories about people, objects, and space, and develop and foster social relationships with others. How does the brain support these remarkable achievements? My research uses a variety of methods, including child-friendly neuroimaging experiments, to address this question. In particular, I investigate the relationship between social cognitive development (i.e., how we think about people) and brain development in childhood. I ask: (1) when do we develop specialized brain regions for thinking about other people? (2) what computations do these brain regions carry out? (3) what kinds of neural changes support social cognitive development? (4) what environmental & genetic factors promote & hinder this development? My research aims to inform theories of cognitive development and address basic science questions about the human brain.