Dr. Victoria Southgate
Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellow
Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development
School of Psychology, Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX
Phone: +44 (0)20 7079 0764
Fax: +44 (0)20 7631 6587
Email: v.southgate@bbk.ac.uk
Research interests
I am interested both in how infants learn about other people and how they learn from other people. Part of my research focuses on how infants make sense of other people and their actions, from how the infant brain processes people and actions, to infants understanding that actions are driven by epistemic and volitional states and that sometimes these might differ from the infants own. A second part of my research involves understanding how infants interpret other people's communication, and how this functions to ensure the efficient acquisition of cultural knowledge.
Curriculum vitae
Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellow, Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck College (October 2009 - 2014)
Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck College (October 2004 - 2009)
PhD Psychology, University of St Andrews, 2005.
Publications
In Press
Southgate, V., Chevallier, C., & Csibra, G. (in press). Seventeen-month-olds appeal to false beliefs to interpret others' referential communication. Developmental Science.
Southgate, V., Johnson, M.H., El Karoui, I., & Csibra, G. (in press). Motor system activation reveals infants' online prediction of others' goals. Psychological Science.
Senju, A., Southgate, V., Miura, Y., Matsui, T., Hasegawa, T., Tojo, Y., Osanai, H., & Csibra, G. (in press). Absence of spontaneous action anticipation by false belief attribution in children with autism spectrum disorder. Development and Psychopathology.
Southgate, V., & Csibra, G. (in press). Inferring the outcome of an ongoing novel action at 13 Months. Developmental Psychology.
Southgate, V., Chevallier, C., & Csibra, G. (in press). Sensitivity to communicative relevance tells young children what to imitate. Developmental Science.
2009
Southgate, V., Johnson, M.H., Osborne, T., & Csibra, G. (2009). Predictive motor activation during action observation in human infants. Biology Letters (published online ahead of print).
Senju, A., Southgate, V., White, S., & Frith, U. (2009). Mindblind eyes: an absence of spontaneous theory of mind in asperger syndrome. Science, 325 (5942), 883-885.
2008
Southgate, V., Gergely, G., & Csibra, G. (2008). Does the mirror neuron system and its impairment explain human imitation and autism? In J.A. Pineda (Ed.), The Role of Mirroring Processes in Social Cognition. Humana Press.
Southgate, V., & Hamilton, A.F. (2008). Unbroken mirrors: challenging a theory of autism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12 (6), 225-229.
Southgate, V., Johnson, M.H., & Csibra, G. (2008). Infants attribute goals even to biomechanically impossible actions. Cognition, 107, 1059-1069.
Southgate, V., Csibra, G., Kaufman, J., & Johnson, M.H. (2008). Distinct processing of objects and faces in the infant brain. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20, 741-749 .
2007
Southgate, V., Senju, A., & Csibra, G. (2007). Action anticipation through attribution of false belief in two-year-olds. Psychological Science, 18 (7), 587- 592.
Southgate, V., van Maanen, C., & Csibra, G. (2007). Infant pointing: communication to cooperate or communication to learn? Child Development, 78 (3), 735-740.
2006
Southgate, V., & Gomez, J.C. (2006). Searching beneath the shelf in macaque monkeys: evidence for a gravity bias or a foraging bias? Journal of Comparative Psychology, 120 (3), 314-321.
Csibra, G., & Southgate, V. (2006). Evidence for infants understanding of false beliefs should not be dismissed. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10 (1), 4-5.
Earlier
Southgate, V., & Meints, K. (2000). Typicality, naming and category membership in young children. Cognitive Linguistics, Special Issue: Language Acquisition, 11 (1/2), 1-12.