Rhianna Watt

Psychologist

My mum is a librarian and so I’ve spent a great deal of my life buried between the pages of books in little library nooks. Every summer I used to go to work with her and set myself the challenge of reading every book in the library. Needless to say I didn’t get very far, but this did get me interested in how our experiences with language and exposure to the written word help us to develop our reading and language abilities from an early age.

This got me interested in developmental psychology, and then psychology more broadly, leading me to complete my undergraduate degree in psychology at the University of Oxford in 2022. Now, for the past year, I have been working as a research assistant with the Oxford Brain and Cognition Lab, using a range of techniques from eye-tracking and EEG to fMRI and virtual reality, to learn about all things attention, memory and perception.

This year, I’ve also had the pleasure of being involved in the Music2Gether community science project – working with an Oxfordshire-based non-profit organisation (MuzoAkademyII) to explore how their music lessons impact people’s wellbeing and confidence, amongst other things.

I’m about to start postgraduate study in psychology at the University of Oxford, where I will be exploring the cross-section between language, attention and memory in the context of reading and language development.