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Professor Dorothy Cowie is Professor in the Department of Psychology and Director of Research in the Department of Psychology at Durham University. She investigates how children and adults use sensory information to ground the sense of bodily self and to guide movement, with current projects examining plasticity in the developing sensorimotor system. Her work employs combined motion capture and virtual reality to study how children accept virtual bodies different from their own, in collaboration with researchers at Goldsmiths, and examines how children with limb differences learn to interact with their environments, in collaboration with Professor Tamar Makin at Cambridge.
Professor Cowie completed her DPhil at Oxford University from 2004 to 2007, examining how young children use visual feedback to control walking. She then held a postdoctoral position at the UCL Institute of Neurology from 2007 to 2010, studying the neural bases of visually guided walking in Parkinson’s disease. From 2010 to 2013 she was at Goldsmiths, University of London, beginning research into the explicit sense of bodily self. She joined Durham University in 2013 on a permanent lectureship. Her research has been supported by major ESRC grants, including one from 2017 to 2021 on the development of own-body representation in childhood and another from 2022 to 2025 on the plasticity of the bodily self. She serves as Action Editor for Multisensory Research and has held external examiner roles at UCL. Key recent publications include studies on the embodiment of functionally altered virtual arms, children’s embodiment of non-human virtual hand forms, global remapping of the sensory homunculus in childhood, and the role of hand size in body representation.
Explore the University of Cambridge and Durham study on brain plasticity in children with congenital upper limb differences, highlighting global somatosensory remapping and its implications for development.
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