Rita Mendonça

Rita Mendonça’s broad research focus is on situated social cognition. She is interested in investigating the core processes that sustain the representation of basic abstract concepts such as agency, time, and politics and how these are influenced by the culturally anchored direction of movement (Spatial Agency Bias). Specifically, she investigates how the spatial representation of multimodal stimuli (e.g., visual, auditory) is driven by the direction of reading and writing which induces asymmetric visual scanning habits. This habitualized spatial bias is likely to constrain our attention orientation to specific locations in space and consequently shape eye-movements, detection latencies and social inferences.