Position: PhD Student Office: Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Room 301, 32 Torrington Square, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX Phone: 020 7631 6327 Fax: 020 7631 6587 Email: dean.dsouza [at] ymail.com

Current details, research information, and publications can be found at my University webpage here.

Research

I am interested in elucidating mechanisms of change and tracing the developmental trajectories of higher level functions such as attention and language back to their basic level origins in infancy, in typical and atypical populations. I am currently running a large battery of tasks that measure visual scanning and attention, and the neural correlates of social and non-social perception, on infants and toddlers with Williams syndrome (WS; a rare genetic syndrome). Later, I will compare the WS data with data from infants and toddlers at risk of developing autism and (if I can find enough participants!) infants and toddlers with fragile X syndrome.

I am carrying out this research at the Wolfson Institute for Brain Function and Development (aka "the babylab"), which houses purpose-built state-of-the-art facilities for infant research. My supervisors are Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Dr Tim J. Smith, and Professor Mark H. Johnson.

Publications

D'Souza, D., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (in press). When modularization fails to occur: a developmental perspective.

Karmiloff-Smith, A., Broadbent, H., Farran, E. K., D'Souza, D., Metcalfe, K., Tassabehji, M., Turnenny, P., & Sansbury, F. (submitted). Social cognition in Williams syndrome: contributions from partial deletion patients.

Karmiloff-Smith, A., D'Souza, D., Van Herwegen, J., Dekker, T., Rodic, M., Xu, F., & Ansari, D. (submitted). Adult neuropsychology models: inappropriate for neurodevelopmental genetic syndromes.

Academic manuscripts in preparation

D'Souza, D., Connolly, M., Booth, F., Happe, F., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (in prep). Reconceptualising local-global processing: evidence from autism, Down syndrome, and Williams syndrome.

D'Souza, D., Rodic, M., Howard, J., Farran, E. K., Dekker, T., Karmiloff-Smith, A. (in prep). Face processing in Down syndrome and Williams syndrome: a cross-syndrome comparison.

Interests

I have a wide range of interests. For example, I love sport (I was team captain and coach of the University of Bradford Fencing Club), volunteering (but mainly for the free coffee), and thinking about archaeology (who doesn't like bones?), cosmology (Carl Sagan is my god), history, physics, and philosophy (notably the philosophy of Yoda) (see below for a selection of my non-academic publications):

D'Souza, D. (2006). Space. In M. Cohen (Ed.), The Essentials of Philosophy and Ethics (pp. 272-273). London: Hodders

D'Souza, D. (2007). Happiness. Psychology, 1, 3-7.

D'Souza, D. (2008). Africans, Europeans and IQ. Psych-Talk, 59, 6-11.

D'Souza, D. (2008). In Search of the Meaning of Life. London: Black Ice Corporation

For more information, please look here.