Lecturer in Psychology & Scientific Arts Lab Director
Dr Jane Conway completed her PhD in Experimental Psychology at King’s College London, in the Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, under the supervision of Prof. Geoff Bird and Prof. Francesca Happé. She was a visiting researcher at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, and at the Department of Experimental Psychology and Brasenose College, University of Oxford. She was awarded a Research Fellowship at the Insititute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, and subsequently a Research Ireland Pathways Fellowship, which brought her to the University of Galway in 2022 where she is now a Lecturer in Psychology and directs the Scientific Arts Lab. Her early work concerned the socio-cognitive ability to represent others’ minds and their mental states, and she studies individual differences in this ability through her 'Mindspace' theoretical framework. Her work currently focuses on how humans build mental models of abstract social concepts that lack ground truth and therefore rely on cultural learning and metacognition for their evolution, development, and performance.