Who We Are
- A/Prof Amy Perfors
Lab Leader
School of Psychological Sciences
University of Melbourne
+61 3 9035 6032
609 Redmond Barry BldgUniversity of Melbourne
Parkville, VIC 3052
I'm interested in many questions in higher-order cognition, from language to concept learning to decision making. My general research centres around how the structure of data in the world, and people's assumptions about it, shape and are shaped by cognition. Much of my work takes place within a theoretical framework which suggests that human inference can be explained as a byproduct of reasoning about where the data came from and how it was generated. I’m particularly interested in what happens when the data is given by other people and the subsequent reasoning is thus social in nature. My research is constantly evolving, but here are some of the major current topic areas.
Background: I’m originally from the US, having grown up in small rural towns in New Mexico and Colorado. I got my undergraduate degree in Symbolic Systems and Master’s in Linguistics from Stanford University, and then earned a PhD in Brain & Cognitive Sciences from MIT in 2008 with Josh Tenenbaum. At that point I moved to Australia to work at the University of Adelaide in 2008, and then transferred to the University of Melbourne in 2017.
- Dr Simon De Deyne
Postdoctoral scholar
School of Psychological Sciences
University of Melbourne
621 Redmond Barry BldgUniversity of Melbourne
Parkville, VIC 3052
I am interested in how the mind structures the world around us. I am particularly interested in how concepts and the meaning of words are represented. Given that most words are acquired from the linguistic context in which they are used, one approach is to see what kind of structure and information is available in the linguistic environment. This often involves the use of computational models that encode the contingencies between words from text which we can access using large-scale corpora. One approach I’ve been exploring the last couple of years is the representation of word meaning in lexico-semantic networks using a large data-set of word associations, an approach that I think can teach us something about the way our mental lexicon evolves.
Background: I’m originally from Belgium, having earned my PhD in Psychology from the University of Leuven in 2008 where I worked with Gert Storms. I was a postdoctoral scholar in the CCS lab at University of Adelaide from 2010-2012 and a DECRA scholar beginning in 2014. I moved to the University of Melbourne in 2017.
- Keith Ransom
PhD Student
School of Psychology
University of Adelaide
110 Hughes BuildingUniversity of Adelaide
Adelaide, SA 5000
A central problem of interest to me concerns the nature of inductive reasoning. How are we able to make the inferences we do based on the limited data available to us? The Bayesian framework provides, at least, a computational description of how principled probabilistic inference might proceed. Bayes' rule describes how beliefs may be updated in the light of new evidence in a repeatable and coherent fashion. But in many situations, an application of Bayes' Rule to explicitly observed data only, fails to fuel the inductive leaps that humans make every day. It seems that the process of induction draws upon implicit evidence as well. An interesting line of investigation presents itself, if we assume that people implicitly model the reasoning process of others, and use these models to further fuel their own inference. Perhaps, a kind of "meta inference" provides some of the implicit evidence needed to learn, predict and adapt despite a seeming paucity of direct evidence. I also like kittens.
Alumnae
- Dani Navarro
Associate Professor
- I ran the CCS lab jointly with Amy Perfors when we were both at the University of Adelaide. My research investigates the mathematical laws underpinning cognition and spans a variety of topics in psychology and cognitive science.
- Drew Hendrickson
Postdoc
- I was a postdoctoral scholar in the CCS lab until 2017. My research interests are in understanding what mental representations people learn and how they apply and update them when encountering new items and tasks.
- Sean Tauber
Postdoc
- I was a postdoctoral scholar in the CCS lab until 2015. While there, I worked on connecting probabilistic models of cognition and human behavior to draw explicit, interpretable inferences about latent aspects of human cognition such as prior knowledge, concepts and inductive biases.
- Wouter Voorspoels
Postdoc
- I was a postdoctoral scholar in the CCS lab until 2015. While there, I explored my main research interests revolving around representations of every day concepts and categories. I focused on applying, modifying and developing formal models of categorization in the study of real, every day semantic concepts.
- Wai Keen Vong
PhD Student
- I was a PhD student in the CCS lab until 2017. My PhD research focused on the acquisition and representation of concepts and categories. What assumptions do people make in order to learn good representations from observed data, and how this knowledge can be combined to learn more complex concepts and theories about the world?
- Lauren Kennedy
PhD Student
- I was a PhD student in the CCS lab until 2017. My research was focused on the application of cognitive science to clinical settings, particularly issues of measurement and analysis of psychological data within clinical psychology.
- Steven Langsford
PhD Student
- I was a PhD student in the CCS lab until 2017. My PhD research was centred on understanding and measuring mental representations, with a particular focus on similarity, transformation, and sentence acceptability.
- Dinis Gökaydin
PhD Student
- I was a PhD student in the CCS lab until 2015. My research was focused on the common mechanisms that underpin all cognitive, motor, and perceptual functions, specifically centering on understanding sequential effects in human responses.
- Rachel Stevens
PhD Student
- I was a PhD student in the CCS lab until 2013. My dissertation centred on understanding the bases of inductive inference and feature generalisation: what factors influenced the use of different information to guide inferences (perceptual similarity, causal relations, or category labels)?
- Luke Maurits
PhD Student
- I was a PhD student in the CCS lab until 2011. My PhD research asked why different languages use different word orders and why the word order of languages change over time. It involved taking an information-theoretic perspective on language and asking what is the optimal way to convey information about a world with statistical structure which is known by both communicating agents.