Ciro Civile

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, where I am Deputy Head of Department and Director of Research and Impact. I also lead the University’s submission to Unit of Assessment 4 (Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience) in the Research Excellence Framework.

After completing my PhD in Cognitive Psychology at Exeter, I spent four years as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at McMaster University in Canada (2013–2017). I returned to Exeter in 2017, having been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship and an ESRC New Investigator Grant. I was appointed Lecturer in 2018 and promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2019 and Associate Professor in 2025. Along the way, I have served as Co-Chair of the Psychology Research Ethics Committee and Deputy Lead of the Cognition Group.

My research examines how we learn to recognise faces and why social biases shape that recognition. One strand investigates the neural mechanisms behind effects such as the own-race and own-age biases, objectification and stigmatisation. The aim is to develop neuroscience-based interventions that reduce bias. The other strand studies the neurocognitive mechanisms of perceptual learning, combining transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) with EEG, fMRI and eye-tracking, alongside computational modelling. I also apply these methods to face recognition skills and to atypical profiles such as aphantasia and prosopagnosia. This work has been funded by the ESRC, UKRI and the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme.

I teach courses  in biological psychology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience. I currently supervise four PhD students and a postdoctoral research fellow, and have supervised three PhDs to completion since 2022.