Dr. Cristina Atance is a visiting scholar at the School of Psychology until the end of December. She will be working with Prof. Teresa McCormack on various aspects of children’s cognitive development, including their capacity to think about the future and their temporal reasoning. Dr. Atance is the Director of the Childhood Cognition and Learning Laboratory and is a Full Professor of Psychology at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada. She is also a co-Director of an innovative research lab/space – the University of Ottawa “Living Lab” – at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. One of the mandates of this lab is to mobilize knowledge about child development to the general public.

Dr. Atance has broad research interests within the domain of cognitive development/children’s thinking but is especially intrigued by their memory and thought about the future, and their perspective-taking and executive functioning skills. Her research has been funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the Government of Ontario.