Irini Giannopulu

Considering the complexity of human mind and based on the importance of environmental interactions during development, my work tries to answer the question of "how" multimodal representations emerge in typical and atypical (neurological/neurodevelopmental disorder) populations and "how" the dynamic neural organisation underlying emerging multimodal representations operates.

The existing body of research concerned with typical and atypical children have included, inter alia: the relationship between the representations of objects and the representations of words; the correlation between positive emotional representations and the decision making process; the multimodal cognitive nonverbal, emotional and verbal interactions in free play of severe and middle-moderate autistic children vis a vis mobile toy robots; the emotional dialogues in the presence of an InterActor robot; the cognitive and visual-vestibular representations of virtual movement as well as of real movement in children and adults; the continuity between real and virtual environments in healthy adults via a HMD.

The key future research focus upon whole of lifespan neurocognitive development: typical and atypical populations of children, adults and elderly.

I have supervised two doctoral and several masters' students who have all graduated. My expertise in supervision concerns interdisciplinary literature review, research methodology with humans, robots and virtual/augmented reality environments, statistics. I have published several papers in cognitive neuroscience and psychological journals, and in various interdisciplinary journals. I have also written several chapters of books and two books.

My supervision aims to contribute to the flourishing need for research capacity in the interdisciplinary knowledge: cognitive neuroscience, psychology, robotics, engineering, mathematics, computer sciences.