Paula Parpart
Contact: paula.parpart@psy.ox.ac.uk/paula.parpart@gmail.com
Office: Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, UK
CV: here (email for up-to-date)
I am a cognitive scientist in Chris Summerfield's lab at Oxford. My current research looks at how humans and artificial agents (artificial neural networks) are able to flexibly generalize to novel environments with the help of heuristics as simple building blocks.
Previously, I worked with Lloyds Banking Group and Warwick Business School on a project involving vast amounts of financial big data – individual banking transactions by over 20 million customers - to ask questions about behavioural patterns and psychological mechanism on a big data scale. I completed my PhD in 2017 at UCL Experimental Psychology in Bradley Love's lab on reconciling heuristic and Bayesian approaches to decision making.
From 2016-2017, I was Teaching Fellow on the MSc Cognitive and Decision Sciences and the BSc Psychology course.
I am founder of Brainpool.ai - a platform that connects academics with organistations for short-term consulting projects. Brainpool delivers solutions to sectors such as healthcare, finance, construction industry or government. If you are an academic interested to join the world-wide network, please have a look at the website.
Media
Some media articles.
Guardian: Even low levels of gambling linked to financial hardship.
Nature Human Behaviour News: Banking transactions and gambling harms
New Story by the Daily Mail & News Report by the Daily Mail
Interview by Bloomberg - What Facebook’s Data Scandal Really Means for Regulators
Raconteur - Is it smart to outsource all your AI?
Medium - Brainpool AI: a new platform bridging the gap between science + industry
Techerati - The startup that’s trying to improve the data science job market
Forbes - The Monopoly On Technology And How To Defeat It
Publications/ Talks
Summerfield, C. & Parpart, P. (2021/2022), Normative principles for decision-making in natural environments. Annual Review of Psychology, 73:1,Link
Parpart, P. & Summerfield, C. (in prep), Meta-learning heuristics from scratch.
Muggleton, N., Parpart, P., Newall, P., Leake, D., Gathergood, J. & Stewart, N. (2021), The association between gambling and financial, social and health outcomes in big financial data. Nature Human Behaviour Link
Parpart, P., Schulz, E., Speekenbrink, M. & Love, B. (submitted), Active learning reveals underlying decision strategies. BioRxiv
Parpart, P., Schulz, E. & Love, B. (in prep), Robustness through sparsity in decision heuristics.
Parpart, P., Jones, M., & Love, B.C. (2018). Heuristics as Bayesian inference under extreme priors. Cognitive Psychology , Volume 102, pp. 127 - 144 Link pdf
Parpart, P., Schulz, E. & Love, B. (2018), Robustness through sparsity: A comparison of decision heuristics. Poster presented at the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. pdf
Guarda, P., Parpart, P. , Harvey, N., & Juan Carlos Muñoz (2018), Understanding decisions about time in public transport. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Parpart, P. (2018), Reinterpreting heuristics as Bayesian inference. Workshop on Contemporary Decision Making, 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Parpart, P. (2017). Why less can be more: A Bayesian framework for heuristics. Thesis, University College London
Link
Kopec, L., Parpart, P., Wallang, P. & Love, B.C. (2016). Less Information Can
Improve Clinical Risk Assessments. Talk presented at the Society for Medical Decision Making Biennial European Conference, 2016, London, United Kingdom
Link
Parpart, P., Schulz, E., Speekenbrink, M. & Love, B. (2015). Active learning as a means to distinguish among prominent decision strategies. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin,
TX: Cognitive Science Society.
pdf
Parpart, P., Schulz, E., Speekenbrink, M. & Love, B. (2015). Active learning as a means to distinguish among prominent decision strategies. Talk presented at the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2015, Pasadena, CA.
Parpart, P., Jones, M., & Love, B.C. (2015), Simple Heuristics as Special Cases of Bayesian Inference. Poster presented at the Memory and Decision Making Workshop, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
Parpart, P., Jones, M., & Love, B.C. (2015), Simple Heuristics as Special Cases of Bayesian Inference. Simple Heuristics as Special Cases of Bayesian Inference. Poster presented at the Cumberland Lodge PhD Conference, Windsor, United Kingdom
Parpart, P., Jones, M., & Love, B.C. (2014), Heuristics as a Special Case of Bayesian Inference. Talk at Decision Making Bristol 2014, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom
Parpart, P., Jones, M., & Love, B.C. (2014), Heuristics as Special Cases of Bayesian Inference. Poster presented at the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2014, Quebec City, Canada
Parpart, P., Jones, M., & Love, B.C. (2014), Heuristics as Special Cases of Bayesian Inference. Talk at the Mathematical Psychology Conference 2014, Quebec City, Canada
Parpart, P., Jones, M., & Love, B.C. (2014), Heuristics as Special Cases of
Bayesian Inference. Reconciling irrational and adaptive views of heuristics. Talk at
Cumberland Lodge Conference, Windsor, United Kingdom
Winner of Best Talk Prize
Parpart, P., Jones, M., & Love, B.C. (2013), Reconciling irrational and adaptive views of heuristics. Talk at the 34th International Conference on Subjective Probability, Utility and Decision Making (SPUDM24), ISCE, Barcelona, Spain
Parpart, P., Jones, M., & Love, B.C. (2013), When is it rational to rely on heuristics? Poster presented at the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2013, Berlin, Germany
Parpart, P., & Cokely, E.T. (2011), When does Cognitive Control lead to Biases? Evidence from Memory and Stock Profit Estimation Tasks. Poster presented at the 23rd International Conference on Subjective Probability, Utility and Decision Making (SPUDM23), Kingston Upon Thames, United Kingdom
Okan,Y., Parpart, P., Cokely, E.T. & Garcia-Retamero, R. (2011), The effect of misleading graphs on the comprehension of health and political communications: Who is more susceptible to misinterpret data? Poster presented at the 23rd International Conference on Subjective Probability, Utility and Decision Making (SPUDM23), Kingston Upon Thames, United Kingdom
Okan, Y., Woller-Carter, M., Simon, S.R., Russell, K., Ghazal S., Parpart, P., Garcia-Retamero R., Cokely, E.T. (2011), Overcoming distortions in political and health communication: Mechanisms of graph literacy. Poster presented at the 83rd Annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, IL.
Parpart, P., & Cokely, E.T. (2010), Fluency and cognitive control in judgment: Influences of memory and elaborative encoding. Poster presented at the Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2010, Portland, Oregon
Cokely, E.T., Parpart, P., & Schooler, L.J. (2009), On the link between cognitive
control and heuristic processes. Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin,
TX: Cognitive Science Society.
pdf
Cokely, E.T., Parpart, P., & Schooler, L.J. (2009), Mechanisms of superior judgment: Ironic effects of cognitive control. Talk at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Judgment and Decision-Making, Boston, MA.
Cokely, E.T., & Parpart, P. (2009), There is no “the” heuristic system: Modes of cognitive control in judgment and decision making. Talk at the 16th European Society for Cognitive Psychology Conference, Krakow, Poland
Cokely, E.T., & Parpart, P. (2009), Modes of cognitive control in judgment & decision making. Talk at the 22nd Subjective Probability Utility Decision Making(SPUDM22) Conference, Reverto, Italy
Cokely, E.T., & Parpart, P. (2008), There is no “the” heuristic system: Evidence of reflective heuristic processing. Poster presented at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Chicago, IL.
Parpart, P. & Cokely, E.T. (2008), Individual differences and the use of fluency in
judgment: Paradoxical evidence of reflective heuristic processing. Poster presented
at the 2nd Biennial Symposium on Personality and Social Psychology, Warsaw, Poland
Winner of Student Poster Award
Theses
Parpart, P. (2017). Why less can be more: A Bayesian Framework for Heuristics. PhD thesis, Experimental Psychology, UCL, London.
pdf
Winner of UCL Sully Scholarship Prize for Best PhD upgrade
Parpart, P. (2013). Improving Fraud Detection: A Rational Bayesian Model for Heuristic Decision Making. MRes thesis, Computer Science, UCL, London.
Parpart, P. (2011). Recognize Bayes? Bayesian Modeling of the Recognition Heuristic. MSc thesis, Cognitive, Perceptual & Brain Sciences, UCL, London.
Students
Kate Mumford (2017) MSc thesis - The illusion of understanding (IOED) in the context of Brexit.
Pablo Guarda (2017). MSc thesis: Understanding Risk Attitudes Toward Waiting and Travel Time Variability
in Public Transport.
Matt Bodien (2017) MSc thesis: Ideologue Over Ideology: The Dominating Influence of political affiliations
over personal values.
Sabina Ghinescu (2015) - BSc thesis: Heuristics as a special case of Bayesian inference - Experimental study.
Samantha Mead (2014) - BSc thesis: Heuristics in a Real-World setting: An Example of Gambling.
Teaching
Teaching Fellow in Computational Decision Making 2016-2017:
Student Choice Teaching Award for Outstanding Research Supervision
Student Choice Teaching Award for Outstanding Personal Support
PSYCGD02: Principles of Cognition
PSYCGD04: Knowledge, Learning & Inference
PSYCG201: Applied Decision-Making
MSc Cognitive Science Seminar
Second year Lab in Decision Making
First Year Seminar
Lectures
Computational Models of Cognition. For PSYCGD04: Knowledge, Learning & Inference, Experimental Psychology, UCL. 2017
Active learning. For PSYCGD04: Knowledge, Learning & Inference, Experimental Psychology, UCL.
2017
Heuristics as Bayesian Inference. For PSYCGD04: Knowledge, Learning & Inference, Experimental Psychology, UCL.
2017, 2016
The Cognitive Science Approach. For PSYCGD02: Principles of Cognition, Experimental Psychology, UCL.
2017
Medical Decision Making. For PSYCG201: Applied Decision-making, Experimental Psychology, UCL.
2015a
Consumer Decision Making. For PSYCG201: Applied Decision-making, Experimental Psychology, UCL.
2014
Expertise. For PSYCG201: Applied Decision-making, Experimental Psychology, UCL.
2014
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