Dr Sophie Milward
Biography
I completed my PhD at the University of Birmingham under the supervision of Ian Apperly and Sotaro Kita. I then spent 2 years at the Central European University as a postdoc working with Natalie Sebanz and then 18 months at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, working with Malinda Carpenter, Josep Call and Mike Tomasello. I joined the department at Portsmouth as a lecturer in January 2018.
Research interests
My research focuses on pre-school development of social cognitive skills and specifically the occurrence of interference between representations of self and other. Often when we are working in close proximity or in collaboration with others, we automatically track our partner's mental states (including their task, perspective and emotional responses), which can help us to predict their actions, but may also interfere with our own performance on a task. I am interested in how this develops in children in both typical and atypical development, and also how this differs from the social cognitive skills of our closest relatives, the great apes.Teaching responsibilities
Social and Developmental Psychology, Comparative and Evolutionary Psychology, Health Research Methods, Measurement and Analysis, Research-based learning.