Neil Bramley
Lecturer
- Psychology Department
- School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
- College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
Contact details
Address
- Street
-
Room S2, Psychology Building
- City
- 7 George Square, Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9JZ
Availability
My office hour is 11:00 - 12:00 on Wednesdays (email me for the Zoom link).
To arrange meetings, feel free to email or simply book a meeting with this: https://calendly.com/neil-bramley/30min.
Background
I am a lecturer in Cognitive Psychology. I am interested in higher level cognition, particularly 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 online experiments and games combined with computational modelling to investigate these issues.
CV
92393.pdf
Responsibilities & affiliations
Marketing Officer for Psychology
Undergraduate teaching
I teach PSYL10160 Causal Cognition (http://www.drps.ed.ac.uk/21-22/dpt/cxpsyl10160.htm).
Postgraduate teaching
I give a lecture on Online Experimentation in the Psychological Research Skills Module.
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Areas of interest for supervision
I am keen to supervise MSc and PhD students interested in cognitive science related topics
Current PhD students supervised
PhD primary
- Jan-Philipp Fränken
- Bonan Zhao
- Tianwei Gong
- Stephanie Droop
PhD secondary
Research summary
Computational cognitive science. The goal of my research is to better understand the algorithms, processes and representations that underpin human intelligence. I generally approach this by developing computational theories of human learning representation and control, designing challenging and interactive tasks that distill elements of the challenges faced by natural cognition (see Demos) and having people and my models attempt to solve them. By comparing the behaviour of models to that of people, I try to gain insight into the mechanisms that people use to to solve problems and adapt their behaviour. As well as helping to understand human intelligence, insights from my research inform the development of artificial systems capable of learning and behaving in more flexible and human-like ways.
Causal cognition, active learning, hypothesis generation, control, judgment and decision making, resource rationality, game theory, optimal teaching, iterated learning, rational analysis, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science (see Research)
Research activities
Current project grants
EPSRC New Investigator Grant investigating Computational Constructivism: The Algorithmic Basis of Discovery
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Broken physics: A conjunction fallacy effect in intuitive physical reasoning
(10 pages)
In:
Psychological Science, vol. 31, pp. 1602-1611
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620957610
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
The paradox of time in dynamic causal systems
(7 pages)
Research output: › Conference contribution (Published) -
Learning hidden causal structure from temporal data
(7 pages)
Research output: › Conference contribution (Published) -
Belief revision in a micro-social network: Modeling sensitivity to statistical dependencies in social learning
Research output: › Conference contribution (Published) -
What you didn’t see: Prevention and generation in continuous time causal structure induction
Research output: › Conference contribution (Published)