I have gained my PhD from Stirling University working on children’s perception and conception of visual ambiguity in 2008. Since then, I had various research positions at Stirling University, Lancaster University and Warwick University researching topics in cognitive development such as false memories, mental imagery, and pictorial representation. I started my first lectureship at Plymouth University in 2011 before moving to Edinburgh Napier University for my role as Associate Professor.
My research expertise is Developmental Psychology that informs my teaching. In the past I have also taught Clinical Psychology, and the Psychology of Everyday Experience.
I am interested in children’s cognitive development. My two main lines of research concern children’s (and children with autism’s) perception and conception of pictures as representations and false memories. My third line of research, mental imagery, has emerged as a result of combining both memory and pictorial representation areas.
I am leader of our Centre for Mind and Creativity Research, and of the Developmental Psychology in Practice blog: https://developmentalpsychologynapier.blog/
Most recent publications
Wimmer, M. C., Marx, C., Stirk, S., & Hancock, P. J. (in press). Bilinguals’ inhibitory control and attentional processes in a visual perceptual task. Psychological Research
Doherty, M. J., Wimmer, M. C., Golleck, C., Robinson, E. J., Stone, C. (in press). Piecing together the puzzle of pictorial representation: How jigsaw puzzles index metacognitive development. Child Development
Wimmer, M. C., Dome, L., Hancock, P. J. B., & Wennekers, T. (2019). Is the letter cancellation task a suitable index of ego-depletion? Empirical and conceptual issues. Social Psychology, 50, 345-354.
Taranu M., Wimmer, M. C., Ross, J., Farkas, D., van Ee, R., Winkler, I., & Denham, S. L. (2019). Children’s perception of visual and auditory ambiguity and its link to executive functions and creativity. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 184, 123-138.
Denham, S. L., Farkas, D., van Ee, R., Taranu, M., Kocsis, Z., Wimmer, M. C., Carmel, D., Winkler, (2018). Similar but separate systems underlie perceptual bistability in vision and audition. Nature Scientific Reports, 8.
Wimmer, M. C., Stirk, S., & Hancock, P. J. B. (2017). Ego depletion in visual perception: Ego depleted viewers experience less ambiguous figure reversal. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24, 1620-1626.
Wimmer, M. C., Robinson, E. J., & Doherty, M. J. (2017). Are developments in mental scanning and mental rotation related? PLOS ONE, 12.
Wimmer, M. C., Maras, K. L., Robinson, E. J., & Thomas, C. (2016). The format of children’s mental images: Evidence from mental scanning. Cognition, 154, 49-54.
Wimmer, M. C., Maras, K. L., Robinson, E. J., & Thomas, C. (2016). The format of children’s mental images: Penetrability of spatial images. European Journal of Developmental
Psychology, 1-12.