AVANT

Pinar Oztop
ORCID iD CogNovo Plymouth University, UK

Pinar Oztop is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Early Childhood Department, at Liverpool Hope University. She has received her B.S. in Psychology at Middle East Technical University and her M.A. in Developmental Psychology at Koç University. She recently completed her PhD in the multidisciplinary CogNovo program, at the University of Plymouth. In her PhD, she focused on understanding the dynamics of group creativity and found that different forms of intersubjectivity play an important role on the group creativity processes of children and adults. Moreover, she is also interested in understanding how children work in groups and the role of digital technology in children’s collaborations.

Frank Loesche
ORCID iD CogNovo Plymouth University, UK

Frank Loesche is interested in creative, non-obvious, and playful problem solving. After working ten years as a computer scientist in an inspiring interdisciplinary and collaborative software development team in the semiconductor industry, he joined the CogNovo programme. Here he started to study the temporal aspects of Eureka moments by observing creative problem solving of architects, developing an experimental paradigm, and tracing epiphanies through multidisciplinary discourses. For his engagement with interdisciplinary research he was nominated “Best Collaborator” by partners and researchers of CogNovo. He considers this multifaceted research a useful experience for understanding and applying Cognitive Innovation in his future endeavours.

Diego S. Maranan
ORCID iD CogNovo Plymouth University, UK

As an artist, researcher, and educator, I use technology to question and improve our relationship with our bodies. I am passionate about bringing together art, science, and technology for positive change. I advise for Curiosity, a design strategy firm in Manila that has impacted thousands of lives; co-founded SEAD, an interplanetary network of individuals working in art, science, engineering & advocacy; advise for WeDpro, an NGO that protects women & youth in the Philippines against all forms of violence; and teach at the University of the Philippines Open University.

Kathryn B. Francis
ORCID iD CogNovo Plymouth University, UK

Kathryn B. Francis is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and School of Psychology at the University of Reading, UK. Prior to starting her postdoctoral position, Kathryn received her PhD in psychology from Plymouth University, UK. Kathryn’s research interests concern the judgment-behaviour gap in moral decision-making. To investigate this gap, Kathryn has compared moral actions simulated in virtual reality, to moral judgments made in theoretical scenarios. More broadly, Kathryn’s work examines responses to philosophical thought experiments, presented in various modalities, in both morality and epistemology

Vaibhav Tyagi
ORCID iD CogNovo Plymouth University, UK

I am a cognitive neuroscientist with a background in neuroimaging, social psychology, machine learning and bioinformatics. I am currently interested in investigating factors that influence creativity such as social risk taking, political affiliation and predictors of prejudice (such as right-wing authoritarianism). My doctoral research was embedded within an interdisciplinary collaborative research program (CogNovo) which focused on exploring the cognitive, computational and artistic dimensions of creativity. I believe research collaborations such as CogNovo are at the heart of most successful experiences in research and can contribute immensely to the personal and professional development of researchers.

Ilaria Torre
CogNovo Plymouth University, UK

I am interested in the amazing capabilities humans have to convey meanings with a limited set of phonemes and with very small changes in the speech signal. It's fascinating how such minimal changes are perceived and immediately reacted upon by the listener. In my PhD as part of the CogNovo programme, I investigated how voice influences trustworthiness attributions in listeners, and how this perception is shaped by behavioural experience. I used a methodology based on game theory, which allows to collect implicit measures of trust. I hope to keep working on similarly innovative practical research in the future.