CLARA COLOMBATTO

Hello! I am a Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at University College London, where I work with Steve Fleming in the MetaLab.

In January 2024, I will be starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo. My lab will study various aspects of perception and cognition, with a particular focus on the perception of others' intentional and attentional states, and their influence on our own attention and metacognition.

I will be recruiting graduate students to start in Fall 2024; check out these pages for more information about our lab, the UW Cognitive area, and the application process.

Before coming to UCL, I obtained my Ph.D. at Yale University where I worked primarily with Brian Scholl, and collaborated with Molly Crockett.

My research focuses on the visual roots of social cognition. For example, I am investigating how how our perceptual system is well-tuned to extract others' mental states, and how the attention of other people can influence our own attention, as well as other processes such as person impressions and moral judgments. In my ongoing work, I am exploring how we can perceive not just others’ perceptual and cognitive states, but also their metacognitive states such as awareness, confidence, or uncertainty — and how such impressions facilitate communication and collaboration.