Research fields

• Self-awareness
• Perspective-taking
• Interoception
• Consciousness
• Methods development

Research: brief description

I am a developmental social cognitive neuroscientist studying the ontogeny and development of human social cognition. My current work is focused on infants, with a particular interest in the mechanisms underlying the development of understanding of self and other. I take an interdisciplinary approach and use both behavioural (looking-time, eye-tracking) and neuroimaging (EEG, fNIRS, EMG) methods to ask what cognitive and neural mechanisms support infants’ early social cognitive abilities. 

I am the director of the Centre for Early Childhood Cognition.

Current research projects

• The construction of self-awareness in the infant brain (ERC Advanced Grant, 2025)
• The construction of self-awareness in the infant brain (Carlsberg Foundation, Semper Ardens Advance, 2024)
• Synchrony and the development of the social brain (Independent Research Fund Denmark) 

Funders

European Research Council (ERC)

Carlsberg Foundation, Denmark

Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF)

Leverhulme Trust

British Academy

Wellcome Trust

Recent publications

Grosse Wiesmann, C., Rothmaler, K., Habdank, K., Hasan, E., Yang, C., Yeung, E., & Southgate, V. (in press). From other-reference to self-reference: a reversal of the classic memory bias in human infants. Nature Communications.

Burkart, J., & Southgate, V. (in press). An evolutionary perspective on altercentrism. Invited submission, Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Reviews.

Kampis, D., Askitis, D., & Southgate, V. (2025). Altercentric bias in preverbal infants' encoding of object kind. Cognition, 257, 106074.

Southgate, V. (2024). The origins and emergence of self-representation. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 6.

Kampis, D., Askitis, D., Poulsen, E., Parise, E., & Southgate, V. (2024). 14‐month‐old infants detect a semantic mismatch when occluded objects are mislabeled. Infancy, 29(4), 510-524 Infancy,

Manea, V., Kampis, D., Grosse Wiesmann, C., Revencu, B., & Southgate, V. (2023) An initial but receding altercentric bias in preverbal infants’ memory. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 290:20230738.

Kampis, D., Duplessy Lukowski, H., & Southgate, V. (2023) Training self-other distinction facilitates perspective- taking in young children. Child Development, 94(4), 956-969.

Yeung, E., Askitis, D., & Southgate, V. (2022) Emerging self-representation presents a challenge for young children’s perspective tracking. Open Mind, 6, 232-249.