Lauren Potter

Lauren's research interest in ageing aims to integrate perception, action, and social cognition to understand age-related performance in everyday-based tasks. Current research activities include determining how normal ageing impacts the control and regulation of action in everyday-based manual action tasks. Lauren is also researching how performance on such action tasks is influenced by social-cognitive factors such as belief systems (e.g., age-related stereotypes). Other areas of interest include age-related issues specific to the ageing workforce (e.g., the increase in prevalence of older entrepreneurs).

Lauren trained in Counselling before achieving a first class honours degree in Applied Psychology from Heriot-Watt (2001), along with the University's premier award; the Watt Club Medal for the Highest Academic Distinction. She gained her PhD in the psychology of ageing while working as an Honorary Research Fellow (Strathclyde University 2001-2005) on a large EPSRC-funded multidisciplinary project investigating the biomechanical and psychological parameters of older people's abilities to carry out a range of everyday tasks. This project aimed to encourage designers to take older people's abilities into account so that they can design everyday household objects that everyone can use ('inclusive' design).Lauren returned to Heriot-Watt in 2005 as Lecturer in Applied Psychology, and gained Chartered Psychologist status in teaching and research.