Nayantara Ramamoorthy

Nayantara Ramamoorthy B.A. (Hons), MSc, PhD

Lecturer

Nayantara joined the School of Human Sciences as a Lecturer in Psychology in September 2022. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2020, post which she taught undergraduate Psychology courses at Krea University, India. Nayantara has also previously worked at an early intervention centre as a special educator for children with neuro-developmental difficulties.

At the University of Greenwich, Nayantara is Module Leader for Foundations of Psychological Science and Applied Clinical Neuroscience and also teaches Research Methods. Her research focuses on how individuals perceive another person’s eye gaze, and the underlying socio-cognitive processes at play. More broadly, her interests lie in individual differences in attention and social cognition across the autistic spectrum.

Posts held previously

2021-2022, Visiting Assistant Professor in Psychology, Krea University
2020-2021, Postdoctoral Fellow in Psychology, Krea University

Psychology

Responsibilities within the university
  • Module Leader, Foundations of Psychological Science
  • Module Leader, Applied Clinical Neuroscience
  • Module Tutor, Research Methods

Recognition

Ad hoc reviewer for PLoS one; Nature Scientific Reports.

Research / Scholarly interests

Nayantara’s research focuses on the processes involved in gaze perception, particularly the idea of attentional prioritisation of one gaze type (typically, direct) over another (typically, averted). More broadly, she is interested in individual differences in attention and social cognition on the autistic spectrum.

Recent publications
  • Ramamoorthy, N., Parker, M., Plaisted-Grant, K., Muhl-Richardson, A. and Davis, G., 2021. Attention neglects a stare-in-the-crowd: Unanticipated consequences of prediction-error coding. Cognition, 207, p.104519
  • Ramamoorthy, N., Jamieson, O., Imaan, N., Plaisted-Grant, K. and Davis, G., 2021. Enhanced detection of gaze toward an object: Sociocognitive influences on visual search. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 28(2), pp.494-502
  • Ramamoorthy, N., Plaisted-Grant, K. and Davis, G., 2019. Fractionating the stare-in-the-crowd effect: Two distinct, obligatory biases in search for gaze. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 45(8), p.1015