Natália Lisandra Fernandes

Natália Lisandra Fernandes’ main research interests include experimental psychology, cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology. Currently, she is working on various projects exploring the evolutionary underpinnings of cognitive functioning, particularly with respect to the behavioral immune system functioning. Specifically, she has been exploring whether human memory and attention are biased or tuned to solve fitness-relevant adaptive problems, particularly those that involve contamination and reproduction. She received two research awards in 2021: the ‘Research Award in Psychology and Behavioral Sciences’, granted by the ISPA-Instituto Universitário, and the ‘APPE Research Award’ granted by the Associação Portuguesa de Psicologia Experimental. She is currently the Co-Principal Investigator of a project, supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, that aims to develop virtual reality environments to further investigate the mnemonic tuning for contamination: “Coming out of the box: Moving from traditional to virtual procedures to explore prospective memory and contamination” (EXPL/PSI-GER/1008/2021).