Institute of Education London

Dr Liz Pellicano

• Qualifications and position:
  • BSc, MPsych (Applied Dev. Psychology), PhD
  • Senior Lecturer in Autism Education
• Faculty:
  • Faculty of Policy and Society
• Department:
  • Department of Psychology and Human Development
• Centre:
  • Centre for Research in Autism and Education (CRAE)
• Summary:
  • I am committed to advancing our understanding of the fundamental factors that affect the quality of everyday lives of people with autism. My research focuses on two factors in particular:
    (1) Executive function, the range of skills we need to organize our lives, to adjust flexibly to change, and to think "outside the box"
    (2) Visual perception, the ways in which we see, interpret, and understand the world around us.
    I investigate these factors using experimental methods from psychological science in order both to develop subtle theoretical models of the distinctive challenges faced by people with autism and to trace the impact of those challenges on daily life, especially in childhood and in a range of learning environments.
• Research Projects:
  • The developing cognitive phenotype of autism: a 3-year follow-up study
    (funded by the British Academy)
    Adaptive processes in autism spectrum disorder
    (funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC))
    The role of adaptive coding mechanisms in the development of face perception (funded by the Australian Research Council)
    Visual processing in autism
    (funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council, Australia)
• Conferences/presentations:
  • 'Unsystematic and non-optimal large-scale search in autism', Invited seminar presented at the Istituto di Neuroscienze – CNR – Pisa, December 2010.
    
    'Bridging Autism, Science, and Society: Considering the real-world implications of the new sciences of autism', Invited public lecture in the Kingwood Trust lecture series, Henley-on-Thames, November 2010.
    
    'The developing neurocognitive phenotype of autism: Implications for intervention', Paper presented at the Oxford Regional Meeting of the British Academy of Childhood Disability (BACD), Oxford, June 2010.
    
    'Diminished perceptual adaptation in autism: A working hypothesis', Invited seminar presented in the School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, UK, February 2010.