Rhiannon has a background in Developmental Psychology and has conducted research with a broad range of ages, from infancy to adulthood.
She completed her PhD (ESRC funded) at Birkbeck, University of London in 2013, which explored the influence that learned semantic associations had on processing of current audio-visual stimuli. Subsequently she worked at Goldsmiths, University of London for 4 years, as a Postdoctoral Research Associate and InfantLab Coordinator. At Goldsmiths, her research programme focused on how infants and children relate distally presented stimuli (sound and vision), to touch stimuli presented on their bodies (hands).
Across her research career she has investigated how children explore their environments, how they constrain their perception based on prior experience, how they combine information delivered across their senses and how they relate this information to their own bodies. This background supports her ability to investigate how children can best engage with, and learn from, interactions with their environment. As a part of Move2Learn Rhiannon is currently working on developing methods to capture meaning making during interactions with museum exhibits, as well as ways to elicit children’s gestures during interviews. She is also exploring the kinds of gestures that expert adults make when talking about the science ideas behind exhibits.