Dr Kinga Morsanyi

I completed a BSc in Psychology and an MSc in Cognitive Neuropsychology at the Lorand Eotvos University in Hungary. I obtained my PhD in Experimental/Developmental Psychology at the University of Plymouth in 2010. My PhD project concerned the development of reasoning heuristics in autism and in typical development. During my PhD, I also worked as a Teaching and Research Associate at the University of Plymouth. Following my PhD, I obtained a post-doctoral position at the University of Geneva, and worked on a project concerning the development of conditional reasoning skills. Subsequently, I was awarded an ESRC post-doctoral fellowship and moved to the University of Cambridge. My project investigated the reasoning skills of children with developmental dyscalculia and children with exceptional mathematics skills. Before moving to Loughborough in July 2020, I worked as a Lecturer in Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast.

My research concerns the development of mathematical abilities and mathematics anxiety, and the contribution of reasoning skills to mathematics performance. I am also interested in how affective and motivational states influence maths and reasoning abilities, as well as people’s decisions, and how maths and reasoning skills can be improved by training. I also have a background in the development of reasoning skills in typical development and in special populations (in developmental dyscalculia and autism). I am particularly interested in reasoning heuristics, probabilistic reasoning and analogical reasoning. I am also interested in psychological measurement. My work has been funded by grants from the ESRC, the Nuffield Foundation, the Royal Society, the British Academy, the Research Grants Council Hong Kong, the Higher Education Innovation Fund, and the Higher Education Academy Psychology Network. As a student, I received study visit grants from the Experimental Psychology Society and the Action Austria-Hungary Fund. I also received an outstanding student paper award from the Cognitive Science Society.

• You can find a public report of my Nuffield Foundation-funded project on dyscalculia here.
• Check out my google scholar profile for a list of publications.
• Follow me on Twitter.

• I am Associate Editor of the British Journal of Developmental Psychology and Cognitive Science
• I am editorial board member of Developmental Review; Learning and Individual Differences and Journal of Cognition
• I edited a special issue of Thinking and Reasoning on Reasoning and mathematics
• I edited a special issue of Frontiers in Cognitive Psychology on mathematical and statistics anxiety
• I edited a book on Thinking, reasoning and decision making in autism
• I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
• I am a founding member of the UK Young Academy 
• I am a member of the Young Academy of Europe 
• I am working group lead of the SLDN Network 
• I am leading the development of Numeralis, an assessment tool for dyscalculia