Martin Pickering
British cognitive psychologist
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ToursExplore Lably’s 3D toursEarly life and education
Pickering was educated at the City of London School and studied psychology at Durham University, graduating with a first-class Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1987. He completed his PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of Edinburgh in 1991, having been supervised by Elisabet Engdahl.
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Career and research
After a period as a postdoc, he joined the University of Glasgow as a lecturer in 1995. He returned to Edinburgh as Reader in Psychology in 2000, and was promoted to Professor in 2003. He serves as the Director of Research for the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh.
Pickering describes his main research interests within the psychology of language as language production, language comprehension, dialogue, language and imagination, joint action, and bilingualism.
He has served as editor of the Journal of Memory and Language and in 2023 was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) in 2007. He was also the recipient of the Experimental Psychology Society Mid-Career Award. In April 2026, Aix-Marseille University awarded him an honorary doctorate in recognition of his contributions to psycholinguistics.