Bahar Tunçgenç: "Action Copying and Social Bonding: Insights from Infants and Children with Autism SD"

Dr. Bahar Tunçgenç

Postdoctoral associate at ICEA

I am a developmental psychologist, exploring the links between motor movements and social cognition in hopes to elucidate the evolutionary and ontogenetic roots of pro-sociality and cooperation in humans. Being born and grown up in Turkey, I studied Psychology (BSc) and Cognitive Science (MSc) degrees in the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. My growing interest in the evolutionary and developmental aspects of cooperation led me to do an internship at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Postdoctoral associate at ICEA Following this, in 2012, I started doing my DPhil in Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, UK under the supervision of Dr Emma Cohen. My PhD work focussed on how highly coordinated, rhythmically synchronised movements yielded pro-social effects across development. In ongoing collaboration with Dr Christine Fawcett at the University of Uppsala, I am investigating how synchronous movements inform social cognition in infancy. Since July 2016, I have been working as a co-affiliated post-doctoral fellow at the Neurology Department of the Kennedy Krieger Institute and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA. My post-doctoral work is focussed on how action copying - of both rhythmic and non-rhythmic movements - is linked with social functioning in children with high-functioning autism.