Penny Bounia-Mastrogianni

PhD Student

Email: pbouni01@mail.bbk.ac.uk

@penelopebounia

 

Supervisors

Prof. Denis Mareschal

Prof. Richard Cooper

 

Research interests

I am interested in the interplay between the developing mind, the body and the environment from early childhood to adulthood. My PhD work aims to explore how information-seeking and curiosity motivate goal-directed action, especially in comparison to explicit reward. I am also interested in individual differences in exploration and learning. To approach these questions, I am using behavioural techniques, as well as mouse tracking and fNIRS.

My project is part of the MOTION (Mobile Technology for Infant Social-Cognitive Neuroscience) Innovative Training Network. It is supported by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Doctoral fellowship of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program (grant agreement No 765298).

You can follow some of our outreach actions on www.motion-eu.org.

 

Education

PhD in Psychology, Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK (2019 – present)

M.Sc in Cognitive Science, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece (2015 – 2018)

MEd. in Education Sciences - Special Education, University of Nicosia, Cyprus (2013 – 2014)

B.A. in Primary Education (4-year programme), University of Thessaly, Greece (2007 – 2011)

 

Research Experience

2016-2018 – MSc student

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Multisensory and Temporal Processing Lab (MultiTime Lab). Supervisor: Prof. Argiro Vatakis
(The effects of voluntary action on time perception)

 

Conference presentations/posters

Bounia-Mastrogianni, P., Ghilardi, T., Poli, F., Hunnius, S., & Mareschal, D. (2022). Object exploration with vision and touch – Preschoolers’ information sampling strategies across modalities. Poster presentation at the 7th Lancaster Conference on Infant and Early Child Development (LCICD 2022), August 24-26, Lancaster, UK.

Bounia-Mastrogianni, P., Cooper, R., & Mareschal, D. (2022). Planning instrumental and epistemic actions across development - An online study. Poster presentation at the 12th CEU Conference on Cognitive Development (BCCCD22), January 10-14, Budapest, Hungary (online)

Bounia-Mastrogianni, P., Thanopoulos, V., & Vatakis, A. (2018). Intentional binding between actions and naturalistic multisensory effects: The role of semantic relatedness. Talk presented at the 5th Conference of the Hellenic Cognitive Science Society, May 17-20, Paros, Greece.