Dr. Elpida Pavlidou is currently a Cognitive Psychologist and Lecturer at the University of York, UK. She is also affiliated with Haskins Laboratories (Yale University) and the University of Edinburgh.
Her research focuses mainly on how people learn and read words, and why some people have difficulties (e.g. the reason why some children confuse “nap” with “pan” or why they take 20 minutes instead of 5 to read a paragraph from “Harry Potter”). To find an answer to these questions, Elpida’s research uses neuroimaging techniques (MRI and EEG) to study the behavior of children in experiments and the activity of their brain during these experiments.
In 2012, the European Commission – via the Marie Curie International Fellowships scheme – funded her ground-breaking research on developmental dyslexia and a type of learning called implicit learning.
Elpida’s research work is regularly published in international journals and conferences in order to contribute to further understanding of some of the fundamental processes of reading. Her effort to find a way to convert research findings into fun ways to help children in their struggle with words lies at the heart of her research work. In the context of this effort and with the support of her research associates in Europe and the USA, a pilot approach for children with developmental dyslexia has been launched in English: I-L3.A.R.N. (http://honey-bee.wix.com/ilearn-project) is an innovative educational application for tablets based on her research findings. For the first time at a global level, the effectiveness of a non-linguistic intervention for the improvement of the reading skills of children with reading difficulties is tested on the basis of the theoretic principles and research data of implicit learning.