Supervisors
Prof. Emily Jones
Dr. Anna Gui
Prof. Robert Leech, King’s College
Dr. Silvia Dalvit, BabyBrains
Research interests
My research aims at understanding the social and cognitive development of neurotypical and neurodiverse children. Previously, my research has mostly focused on the development of language and communication skills in typically-developing children. In my PhD, I am now focusing on the early development of neurodiverse children by investigating which social activities maximise neural engagement in autistic toddlers. To achieve this, I am using machine learning and EEG to map attentive brain states in children with and without autism while they interact with their caregivers in real time. Our aim is to identify the specific social behaviours (e.g., infant-directed speech, eye gaze) that elicit the strongest brain engagement in each individual child to support the early social development of children with Autism.
Education
PhD Psychology, Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck (2023 – present)
MSc Cognitive Neuroscience (Distinction), Radboud University (2019 – 2022)
BA (Hons) Linguistics, University of Manchester (2016 – 2019)
Research Experience
2022 - current | Graduate Research Assistant supervised by Prof. Gabriella Vigliocco, UCL
2021-2022 | Research Internship supervised by Prof. Caroline Rowland, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
2020 - 2021 | Research Assistant supervised by Prof. Kristin Lemhoefer, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour
2017-2019 | Research Assistant supervised by Dr. Thea Cameron-Faulkner and Prof. Andrew Koontz-Garboden, University of Manchester
Publications
Donnellan, E., Jordan-Barros, A., Theofilogiannakou, N., Brekelmans, G., Murgiano, M., Motamedi, Y., ... Vigliocco, G. (2023). The impact of caregivers’ multimodal behaviours on children’s word learning: A corpus-based investigation. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 45, No. 45). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6km748xv
Talks
Jordan-Barros, A., Çetinçelik, M., Rowland, C., Snijders, T.M. (2023, October). Do visual speech cues facilitate infants’ neural tracking of speech? Lightning Talk presented at the 15th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL 2023, Marseille, France).
Poster Presentations
Jordan-Barros, A., Çetinçelik, M., Rowland, C., Snijders, T.M. (2023, October). Do visual speech cues facilitate infants’ neural tracking of speech? Poster presented at the 15th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL 2023, Marseille, France).
Jordan-Barros, A., Çetinçelik, M., Rowland, C., Snijders, T.M. (2022, August). The role of audio-visual cues on infants’ cortical speech tracking and word segmentation. Poster presented at the 7th Lancaster Conference on Infant and Early Child Development (LCICD 2022, Lancaster, UK).
Jordan-Barros, A., Çetinçelik, M., Rowland, C., Snijders, T.M. (2022, April). The role of audio-visual cues on infants’ cortical speech tracking and word segmentation. Poster presented at the 18th NVP Winter Conference on Brain and Cognition (NVP 2022, Egmond aan Zee, The Netherlands).
Awards and Funding
MRC iCASE studentship, UCL-Birkbeck MRC Doctoral Training Partnership (2023-2027): Full scholarship (fees + stipend) for PhD research funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) UK
Faculty of Humanities Dean’s Award for Achievement (2019): Granted by the Faculty of Humanities Dean of the University of Manchester for students with outstanding academic achievements
Manchester Q-Step Centre Dissertation Prize (2019): Awarded by the Q-Step Centre to the best undergraduate Linguistics dissertation using Quantitative Methods in 2019