Andy Wills

Hi, I'm Andy J. Wills, Ph.D. (he/him) and a Professor of Psychology at the School of Psychology , University of Plymouth, United Kingdom. I have researched cognitive processes in biological intelligences (mostly humans), and taught psychology to undergraduates, for 30 years.

You can access my academic publications, teaching materials, software, and other resources using the menu icon at the top right of this page.

This is a personal website; it is not affiliated with or endorsed by my employer.

Coffee as a unit of account

Posted on April 1, 2022

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... [Read More]

Tags: compcat

Why a model fails

The difference between knowing that it fails, and why it fails.

Posted on February 3, 2022

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... [Read More]

Tags: compcat

Theory of irrational behaviour supported by brain imaging

Kruschke's EXIT model and the inverse base-rate effect

Posted on November 29, 2021

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. [Read More]

Tags: attlearn

The CAL model

A new formal theory of category learning

Posted on July 6, 2021

I’m pleased to announce that our paper on the CAL model has been accepted for publication, at Psychological Review (lead author: René Schlegelmilch). You can read the preprint here. [Read More]

Tags: theory

AI vs. human

Basic object classification still hard for AI

Posted on July 5, 2021

In recent years, there have been quite a few claims that state-of-the-art AI has reached human levels of performance in object recognition. In a recent talk, I briefly discuss some of the evidence against that view, including some preliminary unpublished work from my lab. You can now view that talk... [Read More]

Tags: software