Martin John Pickering (born 2 June 1966) is a British cognitive psychologist. He is Professor of the Psychology of Language and Communication at the University of Edinburgh.
Pickering was privately 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 supervised by Elisabet Engdahl.
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.
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.
His former doctoral students include Andrew J. Stewart.