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 navigation menu at the top of this page.

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

GPT-3 does math

You have done something you consider to be impossible, what do you conclude from this?

Posted on September 27, 2022

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... [Read More]

Tags: compcat

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