Dr Ana Pesquita
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Dr Ana Pesquita
Research Interests
I am a cognitive neuroscientist interested in a simple but radical idea: that minds are not passive receivers of information but bring forth their worlds through action. Cognition is something bodies do. My earlier work explored this in adults, studying how we perceive other people, integrate information across the senses, and use prediction to make sense of experience. But if knowing is rooted in acting, then the deepest questions lead backwards, to the point where a body first learns what it can do. So my focus has moved to infancy, where the loop between action and understanding is being built. At the Aston IHN Baby Lab, I study how infants learn through their own exploration. Every gaze shift and every seemingly aimless movement is a small experiment, and we ask how the developing brain learns from these self-generated experiences. I lead the infant OPM-MEG programme at Aston. Infant OPM-MEG has been hailed as one of the most exciting recent developments in neuroimaging (Turk-Browne & Aslin, 2024, Trends in Neurosciences), offering unprecedented resolution in an infant-friendly method: it tracks brain activity millisecond by millisecond, with lightweight sensors that adapt to a baby's head and allow free movement. To date, only a few of labs worldwide can record OPM-MEG in infants, and Aston is one of them. My research has been supported by competitive funding at every stage of my career. Before receiving the Vice-Chancellor's Prize Fellowship at Aston University, I held a Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of Birmingham. I am equally proud of my students' successes: masters and undergraduate students I have supervised have gone on to secure places in coveted PhD programmes at Oxford and Cambridge.
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