Birkbeck academic awarded Experimental Psychology Society prize
This marks the first time a Birkbeck academic has received the Experimental Psychology Society’s Frith Prize Lecturer award.
Dr Denise Cadete, Associate Lecturer in the School of Psychological Sciences, has been awarded the Experimental Psychology Society’s (EPS) Fifteenth Frith Prize Lecturer prize.
The Frith Prize is an EPS Early Career Award (up to one year post doctorate), and its purpose is to recognise experimental psychologists at the start of their career who have produced an exceptional body of work in their PhD thesis.
Dr Cadete said, “Winning the Frith Prize gave me the feeling that I am in the right place, and that my research matters. It recognises my work and the importance of researching how the mind perceives the body, and how flexible it is in going beyond it.”
Dr Cadete studied MSc Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology at Birkbeck, and then continued her studies at Birkbeck, undertaking a PhD investigating the perception of extra body parts and the perception of body physics, which led to her being awarded the Faculty of Science PhD prize. She then received the Institutional Funding for Research Culture (IFRC) scholarship and is now an associate lecturer at Birkbeck.
Explaining her research, Dr Cadete said: “In one line of work, I study how people perceive extra body parts, such as a sixth finger or an additional arm, using multisensory body illusions. I have shown that supernumerary (extra) fingers can be experienced as distinct from the real fingers, with their own size, shape, posture, and action possibilities. This work shows how our mind can easily integrate illusory body parts that we have never had and that do not exist in human anatomy or genetics, revealing a striking flexibility in how the body is represented.
“In a second line of research, I investigate how people perceive the physical properties of their own bodies, such as weight, size, and density. I have found that body weight is represented differently from object weight, and that people systematically underestimate the density of their own hands. Indeed, the perceived density of the hand is closer to that of very light materials, such as foam beads. This highlights how the body is uniquely represented in the brain, with its physical properties encoded differently from those of external objects.
“In the future, I plan to characterise the conscious experience of perceiving illusory extra fingers, distinguishing this experience from the perception of real body parts. This work will help clarify how prosthetics and augmentation robotics can be integrated into the nervous system, and what the limits of this integration are.”
Dr Cadete will present at the prize lecture at the University of Essex, due to take place from 1-3 July 2026.