Research Interests
My PhD examines early motor skills and what they can tell us about later traits and conditions, such as ADHD and autism, and cognitive development. I am using a mixture of methods, including developing a prototype of an app to measure early motor skills, conducting a meta-analysis of existing literature, genetic and behavioural analyses looking at fine motor skills and their associations with later traits, and another genetic analysis investigating whether earlier walking has a causal effect on later language and cognitive skills and neurodevelopmental conditions.
Supervisors
Prof. Angelica Ronald (Birkbeck/Surrey)
Prof. Pasco Fearon (UCL/Cambridge)
Kumar Jacob (Mindwave Ventures, Industrial supervisor)
Funding
MRC iCASE studentship, UCL-Birkbeck MRC Doctoral Training Partnership
Education
PhD in Psychology, Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK (2019 – present)
MSc Educational Neuroscience, Birkbeck and the UCL Institute of Education
BSc Psychology, Sussex University
Publications
Bowler, A., Arichi, T., Fearon, P., Meaburn, E., Begum-Ali, J., Pascoe, G., Johnson, M. H., Jones E. J. H. Jones., Ronald, A. (submitted [preprint]). Phenotypic and genetic associations between preschool fine motor skills and later neurodevelopment, psychopathology, and educational achievement. Biological Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/y87wq
Hewitt, S., Habicht, J., Bowler, A., Lockwood, P. L., & Hauser, T. U. (in press). Probing apathy in children and adolescents with the Apathy Motivation Index-Child Version. Behavior Research Methods.
Dubois, M., Bowler, A., Moses-Payne, M. E., Habicht, J., Moran, R., Steinbeis, N., & Hauser, T. U. (2022). Exploration heuristics decrease during youth. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 22(5), 969–983. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-022-01009-9
Habicht, J., Bowler, A., Moses-Payne, M. E., & Hauser, T. U. (2022). Children are full of optimism, but those rose-tinted glasses are fading—Reduced learning from negative outcomes drives hyperoptimism in children. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(8), 1843–1853. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001138
Bowler, A., Habicht, J., Moses-Payne, M. E., Steinbeis, N., Moutoussis, M., & Hauser, T. U. (2021). Children perform extensive information gathering when it is not costly. Cognition, 208, 104535. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104535
Moses-Payne, M. E., Habicht, J., Bowler, A., Steinbeis, N., & Hauser, T. U. (2021). I know better! Emerging metacognition allows adolescents to ignore false advice. Developmental Science, 24(5), e13101. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13101
Bach, D. R., Moutoussis, M., Bowler, A., Neuroscience in Psychiatry Network consortium, & Dolan, R. J. (2020). Predictors of risky foraging behaviour in healthy young people. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(8), 832–843. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0867-0
Farran, E. K., Bowler, A., D’Souza, H., Mayall, L., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Sumner, E., Brady, D., & Hill, E. L. (2020). Is the Motor Impairment in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) a Co-Occurring Deficit or a Phenotypic Characteristic? Advances in Neurodevelopmental Disorders, 4(3), 253–270. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41252-020-00159-6
Farran, E. K., Bowler, A., Karmiloff-Smith, A., D’Souza, H., Mayall, L., & Hill, E. L. (2019). Cross-Domain Associations Between Motor Ability, Independent Exploration, and Large-Scale Spatial Navigation; Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Williams Syndrome, and Typical Development. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00225