Associate ProfessorMicah Goldwater

Human intelligence is defined by our capacity to generalise — to recognise that a new problem shares deep structure with something we already understand, and to use that recognition to think, learn, and decide more effectively. My research investigates the cognitive mechanisms behind this capacity, connecting work on analogical reasoning, category learning, causal thinking, and language under a unified account of how the mind represents relational structure. This integrative perspective has informed theories of prefrontal cortex function, generated predictions for improving science education, and shed light on how children acquire language and direct their own learning.

A core principle of my approach is that basic cognitive theory and real-world problems should inform each other in a continuous cycle. Identifying where cognitive science has the potential to help — but where the theoretical foundations are not yet strong enough to support application — drives the questions I ask in the lab. That cycle has led my work in two applied directions: improving how students transfer knowledge to new contexts, and understanding how people evaluate scientific evidence in health decisions and resist the influence of propaganda and disinformation. These may seem like distant problems, but they share the same cognitive roots — the same processes that enable insight can also make us vulnerable to motivated reasoning and misleading information.

Across projects, my research integrates experimental psychology, computational modelling, and analysis of naturalistic datasets, and is pursued in collaboration with researchers across cognitive science, education, and public health.