Rachel Stephens

Room 237, Hughes Building Fax +61 (08) 8303 3770 rachel.stephens@adelaide.edu.au

Area of Research

Cognitive Psychology: Categorisation and feature inference

 Memberships

Australasian Society for Experimental Psychology

Brain and Cognition Unit

Golden Key International Honour Society

The University of Adelaide’s Psychology Students Association

Awards

Brenda Nettle Bursary, AFUW-SA Trust Fund (June 2008)
Australian Postgraduate Award (commenced Feb 2007)
Defence Science and Technology Organisation Vacation Scholarship (Dec 2006 – Feb 2007)
University of Adelaide Undergraduate Research Scholarship (Nov 2005 – Feb 2006)
Norman Munn Prize for Psychology II, for achieving the highest Psychology II grade (2004)

Psychology Research Interests

My research interests span across category-based feature inference, similarity, the status of category labels, decision making and modeling cognitive processes.

The main focus of my PhD research project is feature inference. A fundamental and often taken-for-granted cognitive ability is that we are able to predict directly unobservable properties of objects or events, using pre-acquired concepts. For example, if we come across a cat we have never seen before, we can immediately predict that it probably chases birds and can meow. This ability allows us to have a sense of order about the world and a degree of foresight or control over the events around us.

My project aims to resolve contradictions in recent literature regarding the types of information that people use when they draw on categories (e.g. cat) to infer hidden features (e.g. bird hunting).

Academic Papers

Stephens, R. G. & Navarro, D. J. (in press). One of these greebles is not like the others: Semi-supervised models for similarity structures. In V. Sloutsky, B. Love, & K. McRae (Eds.) Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society