I am interested in children's cognitive development, in particular the development of working memory in typical and atypical children. 

My PhD is a project-linked studentship supported by the ESRC, linked to the University of Bristol with Prof. Chris Jarrold and Dr. Debbora Hall. The overall aim of the grant is to provide a wide-ranging model of factors that drive working memory development and consequently, educational attainment. 

My PhD research is investigating the development of working memory in 6-8 year old children and factors that may impact this development. Currently, I am exploring the return of primary and secondary memory, a previously established concept from the 1960s that has been re-introduced by Unsworth and Engle (2007). I am interested in the development of the two distinct memory systems and how this may relate to the development of working memory. To explore this I am using free recall tasks and a method in the adult literature by Tulving and Colotla (1970) to determine objective means of categorising recalled items into the memory systems. From this I hope to establish how primary and secondary memory not only relate to one another, but how they may be used to explain performance on other working memory measures.