Rate My Professor Elena Hoicka

Professor Elena Hoicka is a Professor in the School of Education at the University of Bristol, where she holds a BSc and PhD. Her research interests encompass humour, pretending, creativity, social learning, social cognition, touchscreens and screen time, parenting practices such as scaffolding and parenting styles, survey development, pragmatics, deception, trust, generics and essentialism, cross-cultural research, acoustics, and early years development from birth to age five or seven. She utilises experiments, quantitative observational methods, and parent-report surveys to examine how playful abilities like humour, pretending, and creativity emerge and develop, including cross-cultural studies involving the UK, USA, Turkey, Kazakhstan, and other English-speaking countries. Professor Hoicka has developed the Early Social Cognition Inventory (ESCI), a 20-item parent-report survey for tracking social cognition from birth to 47 months, and has explored links between these topics and social learning.