My research focuses on pre-school development of social cognitive skills and specifically the occurrence of interference between representations of self and other.  Often when we are working in close proximity or in collaboration with others, we automatically track our partner's mental states (including their task, perspective and emotional responses), which can help us to predict their actions, but may also interfere with our own performance on a task.  I am interested in how this develops in children in both typical and atypical development, and also how this differs from the social cognitive skills of our closest relatives, the great apes.