Thomas Hills (Associate Professor)

 Thomas Hills

  

Interests:

My research focuses on the cognitive control of search processing in external and internal environments. This encompasses goal-directed behavior and its consequences for human memory, problem solving, and decision making. The evolutionary origins of thought provide insights into both what and how we think, and this is visible at the level of behavioral strategies shared across tasks, and the underlying neurophysiological control that is shared across animal species.

For many common problems involving executive frontal-striatal control, a critical problem is in mediating the trade-off between exploitation and exploration—that is, knowing when to abandon one course of action and switch to another. This trade-off is critical to flexible intelligence, and is central to adaptive problem solving, information search, decision making, and learning and memory. Using the methods of cognitive modeling, semantic space analyses, network science, and laboratory studies, my research investigates the implications for cognitive psychology of this relationship between the structure of information in the environment, the cognitive and neural mechanisms that navigate and represent this structure, and the search strategies that result from this interaction of environment and mechanism.

Research

Publications

 

Representative Publications:

  • Hills, T., Jones, M. & Todd, P. M. (2012). Optimal foraging in semantic memory. Psychological Review, 119, 431-440. pdf
  • Fischer, D., & Hills, T. (2012). The baby effect and young male syndrome: Social influences on cooperative risk-taking in women and men. Evolution and Human Behavior. Advance online publication. pdf
  • Todd, P. M., Hills, T., & Robbins, T. W. (2012). Building a foundation for cognitive search. Todd, P. M., Hills, T., & Robbins, T. (Eds.) Cognitive Search: Evolution, Algorithms, and the Brain. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 9, J. Lupp, series ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pdf
  • Hills, T., & Dukas, R. (2012). The evolution of cognitive search. Todd, P. M., Hills, T., & Robbins, T. (Eds.) Cognitive Search: Evolution, Algorithms, and the Brain. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 9, J. Lupp, series ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pdf
  • Hutchinson, J. M. C., Stephens, D., Bateson, M., Couzin, I., Dukas, R., Giraldeau, L., Hills, T., Méry, F., & Winterhalder, B. (2012). Searching for fundamentals and commonalities of search. In P. M. Todd, T. Hills, & T. Robbins, (Eds.) Cognitive Search: Evolution, Algorithms, and the Brain. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 9, J. Lupp, series ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pdf
  • Todd, P. M., Hills, T., & Robbins, T. (Eds.) (2012). Cognitive Search: Evolution, Algorithms, and the Brain, vol. 9. Strüngmann Forum Reports,, vol. 9, J. Lupp, series ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. http://www.esforum.de http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=13082
  • Hills, T., & Pachur, T. (2012). Dynamic search and working memory in social recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 38, 218-228. pdf
 

Tel:

 

(024) 765 23183

Fax:

  

(024) 765 24225

Room No:

 

H134

 

Email:

 

T dot T dot Hills at warwick dot ac dot uk