Nicola Gregory

Dr. Nicola Gregory is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Bournemouth University's Faculty of Science & Technology, where she has been teaching since 2013. She serves as Employability Lead for the Department of Psychology and is a member of the SC2AN Research Group.

Her educational background includes:

• PhD in Saccadic orienting to social and non-social cues from the University of Exeter (2011)
• BSc (Hons) in Neuroscience from the University of Sussex (2000)

Dr. Gregory's research focuses on visual social cognition, specifically how eye movements allow us to understand others' thoughts and feelings. She employs eye-tracking technology to investigate social cognition in both neurotypical individuals and those with psychological disorders such as autism spectrum disorder, borderline personality disorder, and social anxiety disorder. Her work examines how social context influences eye movements during social interactions and how attention operates under naturalistic social conditions.

Her extensive publication record demonstrates a strong focus on the intersection of autism research, social anxiety, and visual perception. Recent work has explored suicidality mechanisms in autistic individuals, face perception in developmental prosopagnosia, and the impact of social anxiety on gaze behavior in real-world settings using mobile eye-tracking technology.

She has secured multiple research grants including projects funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust and the Experimental Psychology Society, focusing on eye gaze in job interviews and social interactions.

Dr. Gregory actively supervises PhD students including Shel Silva (in progress), Georgia Turner, and Jastine Antolin, and teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programs in Biological Psychology, Developmental and Applied Psychology, and research methods.