Cecilia Heyes is a Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical Life Sciences and Professor of Psychology at All Souls College, University of Oxford. She works at the intersections between psychology, biology, philosophy and anthropology on the evolution of cognition. Her research examines the ways in which natural selection, learning, developmental and cultural processes combine to produce the mature cognitive capacities found in adult humans. She is especially interested in varieties of social cognition - including imitation, mentalising, metacognition and moralising - and the roles they play in making human lives so different from those of other animals.
Her research has been funded by the BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, and MRC in addition to the European Union and The Leverhulme Trust. She is a Past-President of the Experimental Psychology Society, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society.
