Andrew Heathcote

I graduated from the University of Tasmania with a B.Sc. in Physics and Psychology in 1983 and a 1st Class Honours in Psychology in 1984. After commencing a PhD at the University of Tasmania with Don McNicol I was awarded a Commonwealth Postgraduate Fellowship. This took me to Queen’s University in Canada to work with Doug Mewhort, where I graduated with a PhD in Psychology in 1990. I was a Postdoctoral Fellow with Roger Ratcliff at Northwestern University in Chicago in 1991 and in 1992 I returned to Australia to take up a position at the University of Newcastle.


Over the next decade I held a number of Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Projects grants and from 2002-2006 I was Deputy Head and then Head of the School of Psychology at Newcastle.  Subsequently I returned to a teaching, administration and research role, became a full Professor, and founded the Newcastle Cognition Laboratory (NewCL.org), which has grown to become a leading centre for Mathematical Psychology and Cognitive Science in Australia. In 2011 I was awarded a five-year Professorial Fellowship by the ARC, enabling me to pursue this research full time. In 2012 I was elected to the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and to the Executive of the Society for Mathematical Psychology, where I served up to 2016, including as Vice-President 2014-2015. I became a Fellow of the Psychonomic Society in 2013. From 2015-2020 I held a research chair at University of Tasmania and founded the Tasmanian Cognition Laboratory (TasCL.org). I am presently a Conjoint Professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia and Révész Visiting Professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam.

My current research focuses on the neural and cognitive processes that enable people to make and withhold rapid choices in laboratory, work and clinical settings, and on human memory and skill acquisition. My Associate Editor roles include JEP: LMC (2009-2013), JMP since 2011 (renewed, 2015 and ongoing), PBR 2014-2016, since late 2016 Cognitive Psychology and since 2018 Computational Brain & Behavior. I have graduated 19 PhD, 2 Prof. Doc. and 7 MA students. As of September 21st, 2021, Scopus (Google Scholar) H = 41 (53) with 6150 (10586) career citations. Since 2016 my H = 42 and i10 = 105 on Scholar.

Publications by Andrew Heathcote