2020 Winner: Young Investigator Award (Basic Science)

Dr Neil Bramley, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Neil Bramley received his PhD from the University College London (United Kingdom) in 2017. In his doctoral work, Neil Bramley examined how people learn about the causal structure of the world, with a special focus on how adults and children use intervention, observation and temporal information. In Jury’s view, his research has already made novel and substantive contributions to the field, as shown by several first-authored publications in the very top journals of the discipline. He has introduced new ideas and approaches to the study of causal cognition, both in terms of theory-building and methodological innovations, and his work combines careful experimentation with extremely sophisticated mathematical and computational modelling. One impressive feature of Neil Bramley’s work, amongst many, is his use of complex computational modelling to examine individual learning behaviour, and to develop plausible cognitive models that predict and explain learning behaviour.