September 2017. Stephen Cantarutti obtained a partial scholarship to start a PhD at City under my supervision. We will be looking at a range of behaviours which lead to so-called attentional biases and explore the potential of various methodologies for altering attentional biases.

June 2017. We just completed a complicated recruitment round in Psychology and I am delighted that some outstanding candidates will soon be joining the Department.

May 2017. With Francesco Rigoli, we established the Centre for Mathematical Psychology and Neuroscience at City.

February 2017. I became HoD at City Psychology, following Martin Conway, one of the most experienced HoDs I have come across (but hey no pressure).

January 2017

I was one of the external examiners in Jacob Denolf’s viva, at Gent University. A very strong thesis and a very well deserved straightforward PhD award.

December 2016

I visited Bettina von Helversen laboratory. I was really impressed with the rules vs. similarity work She and her group are going in Zurich, especially how the Looking at Nothing effect can provide process-level evidence for a rules vs. similarity distinction.

September 2016.

I completed my three year AFOSR project on the application of quantum principles in decision making. We were impressed that AFOSR funds research at this basic level and we hope our findings on the rational status of decisions will be useful to them. The student funded on this grant, Albert Barque-Duran, successfully defended his PhD thesis this September. Albert is a brilliant researcher, specializing on moral decision making.

August 2016

With Dr. Lee White and Albert Barque-Duran we presented our work at the cognitive section of the BPS conference, in Barcelona.

July 2016

I gave a keynote on the application of quantum theory on cognitive models, at the Meeting of the International Quantum Structures Association. Thanks to Emmanuel Haven and Sandro Sozzo for inviting me (I am standing next to Sandro in the picture).

January 2016

I gave a talk on quantum cognition at University of Nice Sophia Antipolis (France), invited by Eric Guerci and Fabien Mathy. It’s great to see such strong research groups interested in the quantum cognition research programme!

(Pictures of Nice.)

I also became a programme chair for the 2016 Quantum Interaction conference. The QI conference is an excellent forum for exploring inter-disciplinary applications of quantum theory.

July 2015

I just came back from ASIC 2015, where I talked about constructive influences on decision making and a corresponding quantum model. This work was done with Lee White (who invented the experimental paradigm which has been used in this work) and James Yearsley. This ASIC meeting was probably one of the most useful conferences I have attended.

October 2014

I participated in the Winer Lectures at Purdue University. My talk was on modelling Tversky’s (1977) diagnosticity finding. After several years of working on this finding, I still find it fascinating: the similarity of exactly the same two stimuli can depend on other stimuli in the choice set. James Yearsley extended the original quantum model, Jerome Busemeyer, Jennifer Trueblood, and myself had put together. James Hampton and Albert Barque Duran had helped with the design of the empirical tests.

I then gave a talk at the AFOSR review meeting for projects relating to decision making in Arlington VA. This was a fun event, mixing some very basic research, with research from various US Air Force researchers on more applied issues. My talk was on the work Lee White has been doing on how decisions can sometimes have a constructive role. Our main finding is that, if stimuli are of opposite affect are presented one after the other, an intermediate rating amplifies the affective contrast between the stimuli. Jerome Busemeyer has been helping in this work as well.

June 2014

Read this interesting story about the application of quantum theory to cognition, here.

March 2014

Some of our work with the temporal Bell inequalities was covered in the phys.org website. The title of the article was “In quantum theory of cognition, memories are created by the act of remembering” and the author Lisa Zyga. Read the full article here: http://phys.org/news/2014-03-quantum-theory-cognition-memories.html

January 2014

I was interviewed by George Kenney (who runs the Electric Politics website). We had a stimulating discussion about the application of quantum theory in cognition. The full interview is here.

November 2013

Plenary address at the Special Forum on Quantum Theory and Science of Consciousness, DEI Research and Technology Park, Agra, India. The title was ‘A quantum eye into cognition’. (I am frowning a little in the picture, because the introduction was going on for a too long.)

April 2013

Can the act of expressing an impression change the impression? If perceiving a stimulus generates a particular impression, can the act of articulating this impression alter it in some way? The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), USAF, is supporting research on this topic over three years. The value of the grant is £144,023 and its title is “The constructive role of decisions: implications from a quantum approach”.

March 2013

The Leverhulme Trust approved funding for a project on “Quantum similarity: harnessing the flexibility of human similarity judgments.” The project will run at City University London, from Sept. 1^st 2013, for two years. It’s value is £98,962. Despite the esoteric title, three outstanding researchers are collaborators on this project, Jerome Busemeyer (Indiana), Jennifer Trueblood (UC Irvine), and our own James Hampton.

January 2013

I received a Research Staff Prize from City University London, for my work with Jerome, Riccardo, and Jennifer on quantum probability and the modelling of the conjunction fallacy (and related results). The prize was awarded at the conclusion of the 6^th Annual City University London research competition. This is a great initiative, bringing together research teams from across the university. Below, with the VC Paul Curran.