I am Director of the Complex Human Data Hub at the University of Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, where I run the Computational Cognitive Science Lab along with Charles Kemp. My research focuses on quantitative approaches to higher-order cognition: concepts, language, decision-making, information and misinformation transmission, and cultural and social evolution and change.
I use a combination of computational models and experiments to understand the why and the what within these topics. What goals are human learners and reasoners trying to achieve in particular situations? What constraints (cognitive, informational, environmental, social) do they operate under? How do these factors shape their behaviour, both on an individual and a group level? How does this behaviour change the informational environment and what there is to learn?
PhD in Brain & Cognitive Sciences, 2008
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MA in Linguistics, 2000
Stanford University
BS in Symbolic Systems, 1999
Stanford University
Concept knowledge, inference, and learning
Social learning and its effects on information transmission and culture
Making choices in a complex world
Language acquisition, representation, and evolution
Other projects, mostly focused on meta-science questions