Dr Astrid Priscilla Martinez-Cedillo

Profile

Biography

Dr. Astrid Priscilla Martínez-Cedillo is a Lecturer in Clinical and Developmental Psychology at Edge Hill University. She earned her PhD in Psychology from the University of Essex, where she investigated attention, social prioritisation, and individual differences in ADHD traits. She previously completed an MSc in Cognitive Neuropsychology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a BSc in Clinical Psychology in Mexico, including a clinical placement at the Child Psychiatry Hospital Juan N. Navarro. It was during this early stage of her career that she developed a strong commitment to neurodiversity and inclusive practice.

Her research focuses on how attention is shaped by our environment, the people around us, and individual characteristics across development. Imagine standing in Piccadilly Circus looking for a friend. Your attention might first be drawn to something visually salient, such as a person wearing a bright yellow jacket, before shifting towards their face, gaze, or emotional expression to determine whether you have found the person you are looking for. Even in this simple everyday situation, attention constantly shifts between different sources of information, from low-level visual features and salient objects to socially and behaviourally relevant cues.

Dr. Martínez-Cedillo investigates how these attentional processes develop from infancy to adulthood and how they vary across individuals and populations, including typically developing individuals and those with subclinical or clinical characteristics such as autism, ADHD, and callous-unemotional traits. Her work combines eye-tracking, head-mounted cameras, physiological measures, and behavioural tasks with machine-learning approaches, including automated face, hand, and object detection. These methods allow her to examine attention not only in controlled laboratory environments, but also in more naturalistic, real-world settings.

Her research experience spans the UK, the Netherlands, and Mexico. As a Research Associate at the University of York, she worked on the Wellcome Leap 1KD project, using wearable sensors to investigate infant development in naturalistic settings. Before joining Edge Hill University, she held a fixed-term lectureship at the University of Essex. Alongside her academic career, she has also worked as a consultant in clinical and educational contexts in Mexico, where she designed and evaluated mental health and behavioural regulation programmes for underserved communities.

Across these different settings, her work is driven by a common question: how do we decide what to attend to, what captures and sustains our attention, and how do these processes change across development and differ between individuals? By combining developmental, cognitive, clinical, and naturalistic approaches, her research aims to better understand individual differences in attention while contributing to more inclusive ways of studying neurodivergent development.