Room S2, 7 George Square, EH8 9JZ Tel:01316504643
Moore Sloan Postdoc, 2019
New York University
PhD in Experimental Psychology, 2017
University College London
MRes in Computer Science, 2013
University College London
MSc in Cognitive & Decision Sciences, 2011
University College London
MA (Hons) in Philosophy, 2009
University of Glasgow
I am interested in higher level cognition. That is, how people represent the world and think about its alternatives, plus how they use these abilities to plan, imagine, explain, blame and solve problems. I generally use interactive experiments and games combined with computational modelling to investigate these issues.
Much of my research has studied how people use interventions (roughly, actions that “tinker” with causal variables in an environment or system of interest) to learn about causal relationships. A major output of this work is a model of incremental, boundedly rational human learning in which wholesale belief change takes place through a sequence of targeted local changes.
I am currently exploring extensions of this idea to capture how people discover and construct novel theories and hypotheses. This line of work incorporates probabilistic grammars and “program induction” ideas to model theory generation in compositional theory spaces.
I started as lecturer in cognitive psychology at the University of Edinburgh in January 2019. Get in touch if you are interested in doing a PhD or postdoc.