Rhianna Watt

rhianna circle2
DPhil Student
Experimental Psychology

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. In the summers 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 thinking about 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.

 

Now I am a first-year dphil student funded by the ESRC Grand Union DTP. Supervised by Prof. Kate Nation and Prof. Dejan Draschkow, I will be exploring the cross-section between language, attention and memory in the context of reading and language development.

 

Previously, I was 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. I completed my undergraduate degree with a 1st in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford in 2022, and completed an MSc in Psychological Research, also at the University of Oxford, in 2024.

My favourite word

My favourite word is 'wortcunning' - a word from the 1800s that refers to a knowledge of the medicinal and magical properties of plants. Not surprisingly, it's quite hard to shoehorn this word into conversations.

My favourite childhood book

My favourite childhood book is Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson. I read this a lot with my parents, and loved when we’d reach the last page to find the Witch’s pimped out broomstick with comfy chairs for the cat and the dog, a nest for the bird, and a bath for the frog in the story. And the rhyming is so fantastic.