Professor Andrew Heathcote

I obtained my BSc. with a double major in Physics and Psychology and a 1st Class Honours in Psychology at the University of Tasmania. I completed my PhD at Queen’s University, Canada, as a Commonwealth Scholar, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University, USA and have been an academic at The University of Newcastle, Australia, since 1992.

My research interests span a number of fields in Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science, including attention, skill, memory and choice. In the area of choice response time I have focused on theories of speeded choice (e.g., Brown & Heathcote, 2005), and what the distribution of response time (RT) and sequential dependencies in responding can tell us about cognitive processes (e.g., Kelly, Heathcote, Heath & Longstaff, 2001). A complimentary stream of research has developed innovative and widely adopted RT distribution software and analysis techniques (e.g., Heathcote, Brown, & Cousineau, 2004). Application areas include the Stroop task (Heathcote, Popiel, & Mewhort, 1991), reading tasks (e.g., Andrews & Heathcote, 2001), and task switching.

My focus in skill acquisition is on the "Law of Practice" (i.e., the decrease in RT as a function of practice, Heathcote, Brown & Mewhort, 2000). In this and other areas I have particularly focused on the dangers of averaging nonlinear functions across participants (e.g., Brown & Heathcote, 2003). I also have broad expertise in different types of recognition memory tasks (item, source etc., using yes-no and 2 alternative forced choice, e.g., Heathcote, Raymond & Dunn, 2006) and particularly mirror effects (e.g., Heathcote, Ditton & Mitchell, 2006) and modeling ROC (confidence) data from such tasks (e.g, Heathcote, 2003).

Top 4 Publications since 2002
Heathcote, A., Raymond, F. & Dunn, J. (2006). Recollection and familiarity in recognition memory: Evidence from ROC curves, Journal of Memory and Language, 55, 495-514.

Brown, S. & Heathcote, A. (2005). A ballistic model of choice response time. Psychological Review, 112, 117-128.

Heathcote, A. (2003). Item recognition memory and the ROC. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 29, 1210-1230.

Heathcote, A., Brown, S. & Mewhort, D.J.K. (2002). Quantile Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Response Time Distributions. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 9, 394 401.

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