Professor Jennifer Cook
Supervisor Details
Research Interests
Professor Cook’s work investigates action and social cognition in typically developed adults and those with autism spectrum conditions.
- Action Professor Cook and her colleagues have shown that autistic adults move with subtly different kinematics compared to typical controls. Such atypical kinematics can impact on the perception, categorisation and imitation of others' actions.
- Social cognition Professor Cook and her colleagues have demonstrated considerable individual differences in social learning (the ability to learn new information from those around us) in the typical population and have shown that such individual differences are related to personality traits such as dominance. Their ongoing work uses behavioural genetics and psychopharmacology to investigate the contributions of neuromodulators such as dopamine and serotonin to individual differences in social learning.
Her future work seeks to investigate the overlap between action, social cognition and neuromodulators in both in the typical population and in people with autism.
Scientific Inspiration
A tricky question, it changes all the time depending on what I am reading! At the moment I am most inspired by my own PhD students who are being absolutely heroic in finding ways to do their PhD work despite the pandemic.
MIBTP Project Details
Professor Jennifer Cook is supervising no projects this year.