Psychology · Science · Universities · Education
Writing about psychology as a science, higher education, animal cognition, and the ideas that sit between research and teaching.
Selected writing
A case for experimental psychology, functional relations, and animal models as tools for explaining behaviour.
A simple reform for better universities.
Institutions, merit, academic inbreeding, and the cost of rewarding obedience over competence.
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Working ideas
Psychology likes to tell the story of its scientific origins through the laboratory. But what happens when laboratory training largely disappears from psychology degrees?
Notes on teaching psychology through formal models of natural systems.
Shorter thoughts that may later become essays, lectures, or papers.
Research
My research examines learning, timing, decision-making, suboptimal choice, transitive inference, and numerical cognition across species.
The Adaptive Behavior Lab studies how behaviour is organised by experience and by the structure of the environment, using comparative and formal approaches.
Selected publication
Animal Cognition, 2026
A sequential accept/reject version of the suboptimal choice task showing that pigeons strongly prefer the informative option, while rejection of the non-informative option becomes less likely as the temporal cost of switching increases. The results link suboptimal choice to opportunity costs and rate-based foraging models.
Selected publication
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, 52(1), 37–49, 2026
Starlings learned to prefer the option yielding two sequential rewards in the ephemeral reward task. Their preference weakened as the delay between the two rewards increased, supporting the idea that temporal proximity helps assign credit for later rewards to the initial choice.
Selected publication
Behavioural Processes, 234, 105320, 2026
Capuchin monkeys showed either indifference or a less-is-better preference when a preferred food was paired with a less-preferred one. The findings suggest that the less-preferred item can lose value, or even acquire negative value, through a contrast-like process, offering a unified account of mixed findings in this literature.
Teaching
I teach comparative cognition and scientific research in psychology, with an emphasis on explanation, formal models, experimental reasoning, and the natural-science foundations of the field.
I am also developing teaching around the mathematical foundations of psychological science: the foundations of psychology taught through formal models of natural systems.
My work focuses on behavior and cognition, with a particular interest in the computational principles that organize how organisms learn, evaluate alternatives, and make decisions. I studied at the University of Minho and Purdue University, where I received my Ph.D. I later held research positions at the University of Oxford and the University of California, Los Angeles. I am now based at the University of Aveiro, where I lead the Adaptive Behavior Lab and conduct research at the William James Center for Research.
I combine experimental methods with formal and computational models drawn from learning theory, optimal foraging theory, and microeconomics. Much of my work uses controlled choice paradigms to examine how valuation translates into behavior and how general principles emerge across different contexts.