Thomas Shultz (PhD Yale, Psychology) is Professor of Psychology and Associate Member of the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He teaches courses in Computational Psychology and Cognitive Science. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association, and a founder and current Director of the McGill Cognitive Science Programs. Research interests include cognitive science, cognitive development, evolution and learning, relations between knowledge and learning, decision making, problem solving, memory, neural networks, and agent-based modeling. He has over 440 research publications in these areas.

News:
  • Our mathematical model showing how  humans' unique skills in hi-fidelity social learning  explains their unique ability for cumulative cultural evolution was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B  (June 2020). See the abstract and URL under PUBLICATIONS / Evolution.
  • Our conference paper explaining how pre-verbal infants could learn and use binary probability distributions, long before they are able to count and divide, will be published in the Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the  Cognitive Science Society in Toronto, July 2020 .
  • Ardavan Nobandegani's article resolving the centuries-old St. Petersburg Paradox was published in Topics in Cognitive Science 2020. Our earlier paper on this topic won the award for Best Computational Modeling Paper on Higher-level Cognition at the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, July 2019. This paradox concerns a lottery with infinite expected payoff, on which people are nevertheless willing to place only a very small bet. See the journal version published in Topics in Cognitive Science, under PUBLICATIONS / Decision making. Or RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS / Resolving the St. Petersburg paradox.
  • Our article presenting a comprehensive systems model of memory reconsolidation and extinction was published in the journal Hippocampus:  Helfer, P. & Shultz, T. R. (2020). A computational model of systems memory reconsolidation and extinction. Hippocampus, 30, 659-677. See the Abstract and URL under PUBLICATIONS / Memory.
  • Our article modeling Neanderthal replacement by anatomically modern humans was published in June 2019 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. A current controversy is whether this replacement was caused by differential fitness or pure random drift. Our stochastic simulations and math model strongly support the differential-fitness explanation. Pure drift is too slow, too uncertain, and incorrectly predicts Neanderthal incursions into Africa. See the abstract and URL under PUBLICATIONS / Evolution.