Kids In Context Research Centre

Kids in Context research investigates the development of social cognition with a particular emphasis on how children and adults categorize others into social groups, and how these categories then guide further inferences and behaviour.

My research investigates the development of social cognition with a particular emphasis on how children and adults categorize others into social groups, and how these categories then guide further inferences and behaviour. I am also interested in children's reasoning about language and accent as social categories that influence multiple aspects of person perception and social evaluation.

I am interested in high-level cognition. I study both how we make inductive generalisations from specific examples, and how we reason deductively. I also have strong interests in judgement and decision making, including how we think about counterfactual alternatives to reality, and how consideration of those alternatives is related to the experience of regret. More recently I have studied the relationship between regret and decision making in children.

My general research interests are in the development of speech, language, and literacy. My recent work has focused on the importance of auditory sensitivity for speech processing, vocabulary learning and literacy development. My research involves investigation of typically and atypically developing populations of children, and children from disadvantaged backgrounds. I take advantage of wide range of methods in my research, with a focus on complementary psychoacoustic and cognitive neuroscience techniques (EEG).

Agnieszka graduated from the University of York in 2011 with a degree in Psychology before earning her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2016. She worked as a research fellow at Queen's University Belfast and the University of Edinburgh, before returning to the School of Psychology, Queen's, in late 2018. She was appointed as a Lecturer in Applied Developmental Psychology in September 2019. Agnieszka studies higher-level cognition and its development across the lifespan. She is particularly interested in understanding what limits memory for the immediate past, and how those limits change as people grow older. The ultimate goal of Agnieszka’s work is to understand why remembering novel information is notoriously faulty, and to discover factors that can help alleviate immediate memory limits.

I am a cognitive developmental psychologist. Much of my research has focused on the development of different aspects of temporal cognition in young children. I am currently working on aspects of children's future thinking on an ESRC-funded project with Cristina Atance, and on another ESRC project with Eugene Caruso which is examining temporal asymmetries in children's thinking.

As a cognitive psychologist I am engaged in applied educational research. Much of my work has a bilingual focus, involving children and university students learning in a second language or immersion setting. I collaborate with researchers in Canada, Hong Kong, and Chile on language learning and maths attainment in immersion and dual-language classrooms. Research on formulaic language in monolinguals and bilinguals involves collaborators from Japan, Russia, Hong Kong and Malta. I am also interested in the experience of students transitioning to higher-level education from Irish-immersion schools. An ongoing project with the Centre for Mathematical Cognition at Loughborough University aims to develop a Dyscalculia Screening tool.

Chang is interested in cognitive developmental psychology, with a primary focus of research being the furthering our understanding of children’s numerical knowledge.  She is particularly interested in the developmental course of number integration, that is, the process of making connections between number concepts and symbols, which is central to children’s construction of higher-level mathematical understanding.  She is further interested in the developmental trajectories of children’s acquisition of math and language skills in their first language versus second language and cross-cultural comparisons of children’s home numeracy experiences, as well as developing accessible mathematical interventions aimed at improving cognitive and educational outcomes for children.