Hi, I'm Dr. Andy J. Wills, Ph.D. (he/him). I have researched the cognitive processes of humans and other animals - in particular, learning, memory, and classification - for almost 30 years. I've also taught Research Methods, and Cognitive [Psychology / Neuroscience / Science] (select your preferred term), to undergraduate psychology students for more than two decades.
Since 2012, I have received a salary, as a Professor of Psychology, from the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth. However, this is a personal website; it is not affilitated with or endorsed by my employer.
TL;DR: Due to Industrial Action, I am currently limiting the number of new, external, unpaid peer-review jobs I take on. I will still take on some unpaid reviews, proportionate to my own use of the peer review system. Beyond that, I’ll decline requests for unpaid reviews. If you’d like to...
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GPT-3 does math
You have done something you consider to be impossible, what do you conclude from this?
Having mainly focussed on object classification in my career, I thought I’d have a peek at what AI language models have been up to in the last few years. I started by asking it some questions related to immigration, which I won’t post here because one of the answers was...
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Coffee as a unit of account
It seems to be increasingly common to use the price of a take-away cup of coffee as a way of saying something is affordable - the most recent example I came across is that COVID tests, which were free in England until today, are now “less than the price of...
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Why a model fails
The difference between knowing that it fails, and why it fails.
In a peer review I got a while back, someone wrote “Sometimes understanding why a simple model fails is far more informative than showing that a complex model succeeds”. (You know who you are, if you’d prefer to be named, drop me an email). I wrote a paragraph in response...
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Theory of irrational behaviour supported by brain imaging
Kruschke's EXIT model and the inverse base-rate effect
I’m happy to announce that Human Brain Mapping published our paper on the neural correlates of the inverse base-rate effect on Friday; it’s available as open access here. The lead author was Angus Inkster.
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