I’m a cognitive scientist, currently employed as a Professor by the School of Psychology, University of Plymouth, U.K.

I became interested in artificial intelligence through an early interest in computers (I was paid for my first computer program at age 12). I studied psychology as an undergraduate (Southampton, 1990 - 1993) because of a (still-held) belief that psychology can inform the design of intelligent systems. A continuing interest in neural networks led to me studying for a Ph.D. with computational learning theorist Ian McLaren (Cambridge, 1994 - 1998). I continued my Ph.D. research as a Junior Research Fellow (Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 1998 - 2000). During my six years at Cambridge, my research was focussed on the formal modelling of categorical decisions, and on processes of perceptual and unsupervised learning.

Keen to secure a permanent position, and interested in teaching as well as research, I moved to Exeter University, where I became a lecturer at 28 (in 2000), senior lecturer (2005), and then associate professor (2006), in the School of Psychology. During my twelve years at Exeter, my research was principally on the topics of (a) the relation between attention and learning, (b) computational modelling of categorization, (c) object classification, and (d) dual-process theories of categorization. I also became heavily involved in the management of teaching, culminating in a six-year stint as the Director of Teaching for the School.

At 40 (in 2012), I moved to Plymouth to take up a full professor role there. For twelve years, I focussed on research, pursuing the same four principal topics as I did in Exeter. From 2017, I also chaired a major redesign of the undergraduate curriculum, oversaw the transition from teaching undergraduates SPSS to teaching them R, built and maintained an R package to support formal modelling in categorization, and become an advocate of open science, and of open-source software. I also co-ordinated our REF 2021 submission for UoA 4 (Psychology, Psychiatry, Neuroscience), and served for a brief period as Associate Head of Research in the School.

From 2021, I started getting back into AI, slowly, with the first peer-reviewed publications appearing from 2025. In 2024, the changes I had brought in to the undergraduate curriculum began to be reversed. I turned my attention back towards management, taking up the role of Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Health in 2024.

More about me

  • CV

  • Academic tree.

  • Blog: current, 2012-2021.

  • Paper pile Although hard to believe now, this is what we all used to do - go to the library and stick journal articles under a photocopier. By March 2023, I had finally recycled all my photocopies of published journal articles, posting a photo of the front page of each of them here.

  • Undergraduate dissertation (1993), plus appendix.

  • Ghost writing. Back in around 2002, I did some ghost writing for Brown PartWorks, which ended up in a six-volume psychology textbook published by Grolier. They ended up mashing up text from various anonymous authors into chapters, and weren’t that responsive to feedback that some of the information was wrong. The Representing Information chapter is somewhat close to what I wrote, and about 30% of the Behaviorism chapter is related to what I wrote.