Andrew Heathcote

Biography

Andrew graduated from the University of Tasmania with a BSc majoring in physics and psychology in 1993, and obtained a 1st Class Honours in Psychology in 1984. As a Commonwealth Postgraduate Fellow he completed a PhD at Queen's University in Canada with Professor Doug Mewhort, in 1990 and in 1991 was a Postdoctoral Fellow with Professor Roger Ratcliff at Northwestern University in Chicago. In 1992 he returned to Australia to take up a position at the University of Newcastle, where over the next 22 years he held nine ARC Discovery Projects grants and was Deputy Head and then Head of the School of Psychology and was promoted to Professor. During that time he founded the Newcastle Cognition Laboratory (NewCL.org), which has grown to become a leading centre for Mathematical Psychology and Cognitive Science in Australia. In 2015 he took up a research chair at University of Tasmania (80%) and University of Newcastle (20%), and founding the Tasmanian Cognition Laboratory (TasCL.org).

Research Interest

Andrew Heathcote's research aligns broadly with the Universities Data, Knowledge and Decisions theme and particularly with the Faculty of Health's Neuroscience and Cognition sub-theme. His current research focuses on human memory and skill acquisition, and on the neural and cognitive processes that enable people to make rapid choices.