Teodora Gliga
Research Fellow
Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development
School of Psychology
Birkbeck College
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX
Phone: +44 (0)20 7631 6322
Email: t.gliga at bbk dot ac dot uk
Research interests
- My work centres on understanding how general learning mechanisms have been adapted to allow for and to bias human infants towards social learning (i.e. learning from others). I have been investigating, for example, how children acquire an understanding of the uses and rules of communication and language in typical and atypical development (Autism Spectrum Disorders, Williams Syndrome). My work on the developmental origin of autism is part of BASIS, the British Autism Study of Infant Siblings.
- Like many others, I would like to understand how does acquiring language affect the way we perceive and remember the world. Together with Barbara Pomiechowska we use EEG to show that what infants remember about objects during occlusion depends on whether they are able to access the object's name.
- More recently i have become interested in the early origins of epistemic curiosity. Together with Katarina Begus & Vicky Southgate we are asking why some people are more curious than others. In a longitudinal study we will tease apart the role of information processing abilities and of the early social interaction in the development of information seeking.
- I am also involved in developing screening tools for mathematical difficulties, in Romania (in collaboration with Fotinica Gliga).
Curriculum vitae
Editor, Medecine & Enfance, Paris, since 2008
Intern, British Psychological Society Parliamentary Office, 2009 pdf
PhD Cognitive Sciences, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, 2005
Students
Katarina Begus, PhD candidate
Barbara Pomiechowska, PhD candidate
Previous students:
Noreen Gilhooly, MSc Developmental Science, Birkbeck College, 2010-2011
Carina deKlerk, MRes Cognitive Neuroscience, Leiden University, 2009-2010
Publications
Bedford, R., Gliga, T., Frame K., Hudry K., Chandler S., Johnson M. H., Charman T. & the BASIS team (in press). Failure to learn from feed-back underlies word learning difficulties in children at-risk for autism. Journal of Child Language pdf
Bedford R., Elsabbagh M., Gliga T., Senju A. & the BASIS team (in press). Precursors to social and communication difficulties in infants at-risk for autism: gaze following and attentional engagement. Journal of Autism and Develomental Disorders pdf
Gliga, T. & Southgate V. Prepared to learn about human body's goals and intentions. (2012) V. Slaughter & C. Brownell (Eds.) Early Development of Body Representations, Cambridge University Press pdf
Gliga, T., Elsabbagh M., Hudry K., Charman T, and Johnson M. (2012). Gaze following, gaze reading and word learning in children at-risk for autism. Child Development, 83(3), 926-938 pdf
Elsabbagh, M., Holmboe K., Gliga, T., Mercure E., Hudry K., Charman, T., Baron-Cohen S., Bolton P., Johnson M.H. (2011) Social and attention factors during infancy and the later emergence of autism characteristics. Progress in Brain Research.
Gliga, T. & Csibra, G. (2010). Verbal labels modulate perceptual object processing in one-year-old infants. Journal of Cognitive Neurosciences pdf
Gliga, T., Elsabbagh, M., Andravizou, A. & Johnson, M. (2009) Faces attract infants' attention in complex displays. Infancy, 14(5), 550-562 pdf
Gliga, T., Volein A. & Csibra, G. (2009). One-year-old infants appreciate the referential nature of deictic gestures and words. Psychological Science, 20(3) pdf
Grossmann, T., Gliga, T., Mareschal, D. & Johnson, M. (2009). The neural basis of perceptual category learning in human infants. Journal of Cognitive Neurosciences, 21(12), 2276-2286 pdf
Bristow, D., Dehaene-Lambertz, G., Mattout, J., Soares, C., Gliga, T., Baillet, S. & Mangin, F. (2009). How the infant brain matches the face it sees with the voice it hears. Journal of Cognitive Neurosciences, 21(5), 905-921 pdf
Gliga, T., Mareschal, D. (2008). What can neuroimaging tell us about the early development of visual categories? Brain, Cognition & Behavior pdf
Gliga, T., Mareschal, D. & Johnson, M.H. (2008). Ten-months-olds’ selective use of visual dimensions in category learning. Infant Behaviour and Development, 31(2), 287-293 pdf
Gliga, T. & Csibra, G. (2007) Seeing the face through the eyes: A developmental perspective on face expertise. Progress in Brain Research, 164, 323-339 pdf
Gliga, T., Dehaene-Lambertz, G. (2007). Development of a view-invariant representation of the human head. Cognition (2) pdf
Gliga, T., Dehaene-Lambertz, G. (2006). Structural encoding of body and face in human infants and adults. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 17(8): 1328-40. pdf
Dehaene-Lambertz, G., Gliga, T. (2004). Common neural basis for phoneme processing in infants and adults. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 16(8): 1375-87. Review.
Submitted and in preparation
Gliga T., Senju A., Southgate, V., Pettinato M. & the BASIS team (submitted). Spontaneous belief attribution in siblings of children with autism spectrum disorders.
Begus K., Gliga, T. & Southgate V. (submitted). Infants learn what they choose to learn.
Hudry, K., Chandler, S., Bedford, R., Pasco, G., Gliga, T., Elsabbagh, M., Johnson M., Charman T. & the BASIS team. (submitted). Early language profiles in infants at high-risk for autism spectrum disorders.
Elsabbagh M., Gliga, T., Hudry K., Charman T., and Johnson M. (submitted). The development of face orienting in infants at-risk for autism.
deKlerk, C., Gliga, T. & the BASIS team. (in preparation). Infancy markers of later face recognition difficulties in children at-risk for autism.
General public
Gliga, T. (2012) The Social Brain. In Oates, J., Johnson, M. & Karmiloff- Smith, A. Early Childhood in Focus - Developing Brains, The Open University. pdf
