People
Keith Holyoak
Dr. Keith Holyoak is a leading researcher in human thinking and reasoning. After receiving his PhD from Stanford University in 1976, he was on the faculty of the University of Michigan from 1976-1986, and then joined the Department of Psychology at UCLA. His work combines behavioral and neural studies with computational modeling of cognition. Holyoak has published over 170 scientific articles, and is the co-author or editor of several books, including Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning and Discovery (MIT Press, 1986), Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought (MIT Press, 1995), The Analogical Mind (MIT Press, 2001), and The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (2005). He received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992, and a James McKeen Cattell Fellowship in 1999. Holyoak is a Fellow of AAAS, the American Psychological Society, and the Society for Experimental Psychology. He has served as Chair of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society, Editor of Cognitive Psychology, Senior Editor of Cognitive Science, as editorial board member of numerous other journals, and as member of advisory panels for NSF and NIMH. Holyoak’s fascination with analogy and symbolism carried him over to a parallel career as a poet.
Dr. Patricia Cheng is at the forefront of psychological research on inductive and deductive reasoning. She graduated from Barnard College and went on to receive her PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1980. She then taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and completed post-doctoral training in the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon University. Since 1986 she has been on the faculty of the Department of Psychology at UCLA. Cheng developed the theory of pragmatic reasoning schemas in collaboration with Holyoak, which provided the first general account of the influence of content on deductive reasoning in the domain of social regulations. Her current research is primarily directed at understanding the acquisition of causal knowledge. Cheng and her collaborator Professor Laura Novick of Vanderbilt University developed the power PC theory of causal induction, presented in a series of articles published in the Psychological Review. Cheng was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000.