Dr Dan Carroll MA, PhD
Address:
University of Sheffield
Sheffield S10 2TP
UK
Tel: (+44) (0)114 22 26603
Fax: (+44) (0)114 22 26515
Email: d.carroll@sheffield.ac.uk
Qualifications
MA (Oxon); PhD (Birmingham)
Research Interests
Executive development
The ability to think and act in a flexible manner is a fundamental part of human cognition. My main research interest focuses on the cognitive mechanisms that allow children to think and act flexibly, in particular looking at the development of inhibitory control during early childhood. I am interested in how other domains of cognitive development, including symbolic understanding and strategic reasoning, interact with executive skills. I also use ERP techniques to investigate the neural bases of executive control in preschool children.
Other research
I am involved in projects that investigate children's ability to think about counterfactual and hypothetical situations, and about real and possible events in both the future and the past. I am also involved in research looking at the executive processes involved in mental-state reasoning and stereotype processing in adults.
Grants
2007-8: ESRC RES-000-22-2236. "Mechanisms in Stereotype Combination: Causal Reasoning and Executive Function" (with K. Quinn and R. Hutter). £99,672.
2005-6. ESRC RES-000-22-0796. "How do symbols affect 3-4 year olds´ strategic reasoning?" (with I.A. Apperly). £42,632.
2005-6. Wellcome Trust. Value in People award. £5,100.
Key Publications
Carroll, D.J., Apperly, I.A., & Riggs, K.J. (In press). "Choosing between two objects reduces 3-year-olds' errors on a reverse-contingency test of executive function". Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
Carroll, D.J., Apperly, I.A., & Riggs, K.J. (2007). "The executive demands of strategic reasoning are modified by the way in which children are prompted to think about the task: Evidence from 3- to 4-year-olds". Cognitive Development, 22 (1), 142-148.
Beck, S.R., Robinson, E.R., Carroll, D.J., & Apperly, I.A. (2006). "Children´s thinking about counterfactuals and future hypotheticals as possibilities". Child Development, 77 (2), 413-426.
Robinson, E.R., Rowley, M.G., Beck, S.R., Carroll, D.J., & Apperly, I.A. (2006). "Children's sensitivity to their own relative ignorance: Handling of possibilities under conditions of epistemic and physical uncertainty". Child Development, 77 (6), 1642-1655.
