Luiza Ferreira

Luiza da Silva Ferrer Ferreira is an experimental research psychologist and PhD student at the University of Aveiro, affiliated with the William James Center for Research (WJCR) and the Adaptive Behavior Lab (ab.Lab). She holds a BSc in Psychology and an MSc in Health Psychology and Neuropsychology from the University of Aveiro, where her master’s thesis investigated interval and circadian timing mechanisms in invertebrates. Her master’s research focused on interval timing and circadian rhythms in honeybees (Apis mellifera) and bumblebees (Bombus impatiens), evaluating temporal discrimination paradigms and biological rhythms in invertebrate models, with an experimental emphasis. Her doctoral project examines the computational mechanisms underlying time and number processing using structurally matched bisection paradigms in humans and European starlings (Sturnus unicolor). Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of comparative cognition, animal behavior, and experimental psychology, focusing on magnitude representation, biological rhythms, and formal computational models of decision-making.
Her work spans comparative cognition, animal behavior, and experimental psychology, with a primary focus on how living organisms perceive, encode, and integrate quantitative dimensions such as time and number to guide adaptive behavior. Her doctoral thesis “Computational Mechanisms of Time and Number: A Comparative Study in Humans and Starlings” investigates whether temporal and numerical judgments share a common computational metric or rely on distinct processes. Employing structurally matched bisection paradigms across humans and European starlings (Sturnus unicolor), her research combines psychophysical experimental designs with formal computational modeling.

Supervised in WJCR by: Marco Vasconcelos