PhD student at University of Edinburgh

Hi, I’m Steph. Thanks for stopping by.

My research is in computational cognitive science which I like to explain as doing psychology with the help of computer programs.

Our field started on the assumption that the mind is a computer and processes information like a computer. Some, like me, now prefer the more agnostic formulation of what can we tell about the mind if we treat it as a computer? Put another way, if we model tasks that people do with computer programs, can we reproduce patterns similar to what people do when they do the task? Can we help explain, predict and interpret human behaviour that way?

I am interested in how we read other people’s intentions and decide what they must be trying to do from what we see.

Technical keywords for how we study this formally include counterfactual reasoning, probabilistic models, Bayesian causal models, abduction, language of thought and compositionality. I hope to write more soon about how these fit together.

I’m funded by the centre for doctoral training for Natural Language Processing.

I am also pretty much obsessed with mountains (hill running, trail ultras, climbing) and Buddhist meditation.