The School of Psychology recently welcomed Dr Alia Martin, who strengthens our developmental psychology team.

Dr. Alia Martin joins the staff at VUW as a new Lecturer.

Originally from Ottawa, Canada, Alia began her career in developmental psychology as an honours student at McGill University where she began her research program on infants’ understanding of communication. Alia received her PhD in Psychology in 2014 from Yale University, where she studied children’s helping behavior, and expanded her research to comparative psychology, studying rhesus monkeys’ theory of mind. Most recently, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, where she focused on how infants and children use their theory of mind and social understanding in their communicative interactions.

Alia’s research broadly focuses on how humans come to reason about others' psychological states, and how this understanding informs our expectations, explanations, and evaluations of others' behavior, and how we choose to interact with them. She is particularly interested in investigating the origins of mental state reasoning systems by identifying the domains in which they are used. Much of her research focuses on how infants reason about intentions, knowledge, and beliefs in communicative interactions. She also asks questions about social cognition by studying adults and young children, and by conducting comparative research with nonhuman primates.

Alia will be creating and directing the VUW Infant Cognition Center, a new lab where she will study how babies and young children think about the social world around them. The lab’s work will focus on how babies begin to make sense of what others around them are thinking, feeling, and communicating in social interactions, including helping, expressing desires or emotions, and competition.

In 2016, Alia will be the Course Coordinator for a new course, PSYC 238 Lifespan Development, in Trimester 2.

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