Bill Thompson is assistant professor of psychology and cognitive science and director of the Computational Cognitive Science Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley (USA). He is the grand prize winner of the 2022 NOMIS & Science Young Explorer Award and is leading the project How Reasoning About Other Minds Supports Human Culture: Large-Scale Experimental Simulations of Cultural Evolution With Human Participants.

Born in the United Kingdom, Thompson received his undergraduate degree in psychology from Sheffield Hallam University (England, UK) and PhD in linguistics from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland, UK). After postdoctoral training in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) and the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University (USA), Thompson joined the University of California, Berkeley in 2022.

Research Focus

Thompson’s research examines human cognition from a computational perspective, combining experimental psychology with machine learning and mathematical modeling to better understand the key cognitive processes that set human intelligence apart from other species and from artificial intelligence systems. Thompson’s current focus is on the computational structure of core problems in social cognition, such as theory-of-mind reasoning, joint planning and social learning. By integrating methods and insights from psychology and computer science, Thompson’s research sheds new light on the computational principles that make human cognition so open-ended and creative, and helps us understand how our species became so distinctive.

His research on emerging experimental methods that combine cognitive-behavioral studies with machine learning algorithms to trace how knowledge is transmitted between people is detailed in his essay, “An ever-evolving mind,” which earned Thompson the 2022 NOMIS & Science Young Explorer Award.