PPLS student awarded Glushko dissertation prize
Tianwei Gong received the prestigious prize for her Psychology PhD thesis ‘Causal induction in time’
The Glushko dissertation prize is awarded annually and is recognised as one of the most prestigious prizes available to students in the field of cognitive science. Tianwei Gong’s 2023 PhD thesis “Causal induction in time” has been hailed an example of “raising the bar in causal cognition research” and awarded a 2024 Glushko prize.
Tia’s doctoral work investigated how people learn causal structures from events unfolding in continuous time, illustrating how people efficiently abstract useful evidence from rich information and make trade-offs between evidence informativeness and complexity.
I am absolutely thrilled that Tia has been awarded this incredible prize for her PhD. A Glushko is a big deal, not just because it comes with a take home $10,000. It is a career maker for cognitive scientists making their debut in the postdoc and faculty market. This prize could not have gone to a more deserving recipient.
I am deeply honoured to be one of recipients this year. I feel incredibly lucky to have studied causal cognition for my doctoral work, in a lab where everyone has profound insights on this topic, and in Edinburgh, a place that has a rich history of ideas coming from numerous cognitive scientists and philosophers, including the pioneering causal thinker, David Hume.