In focus: Associate Professor Scott Brown

There is nothing simple about the area of Psychology, but Associate Professor Scott Brown is working towards changing this. Brown has already been recognised for developing a new theory on simple decision making in collaboration with Professor Andrew Heathcoate and has now set his sights further.

Recently awarded a Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council (ARC), Brown aims to invest this in changing the traditional method of testing theories of cognition. This challenge is exactly what drew Brown to Psychology in the first place.

After studying science and mathematics, Brown saw a cross over in the degree programs and moved across to the field of Psychology, obtaining his PhD in 2002. He now uses his mathematical background to help solve the puzzles that arise in psychology.

“I did mathematics originally and I liked that but I liked the puzzle of psychology. I think psychology has a lot of difficult questions. My training in mathematics gave me a way to answer some of those questions.

“I didn’t really realise that there were interesting problems that I could help with until I did some research experience during Honours. Then I switched and did my PhD in Psychology and never looked back,” said Brown.

Brown is now using this knowledge to develop a new, statistical model selection that eliminates poorly-performing psychology theories. He states there are too many models and aims to thin the field so research can be more focused.

“What I hope to do is change the way we’ve been trying to select between models to a new, more modern way which has a much greater chance of weeding out the bad ones. Then we can just focus research on five plausible ones instead of 20 maybe ones.

“We’ve used the traditional method of choosing between them for 50 years and ended up with a thousand models. No-one’s model is ever falsified. That’s not progress. What I hope to do is just falsify some models,” explained Brown.

He hopes that by first better understanding how cognition works, a follow on benefit will be more accurate treatments.

“I think that the theoretical and cognitive side can inform the clinical point of view – if you better understand decision making you can perhaps make better clinical approaches to teaching it,” added Brown.

Now faced with the opportunity of four years to do nothing but research this area, Brown said his focus will also turn to building new collaborations to encourage fresh research.

“It’s important to keep building new collaborations with new people to open up new ideas and I need to keep doing that as much as possible. This will be something that the Fellowship really facilitates by giving me both the time to do that and a little bit of money to help make it happen,” said Brown.

For more information on Associate Professor Scott Brown, please click here.