Rate My Professor Andrew Heathcote

Andrew Heathcote is a Conjoint Professor in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He graduated from the University of Tasmania with a B.Sc. majoring in Physics and Psychology in 1983 and obtained First Class Honours in Psychology in 1984. He commenced his PhD at the University of Tasmania in 1985, was awarded a Commonwealth Postgraduate Fellowship, transferred to Queen's University in Canada, and graduated with a PhD in Psychology in 1990. Following a postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Roger Ratcliff at Northwestern University in 1991, he took up a faculty position at the University of Newcastle in 1992. Over the next decade, he held multiple Australian Research Council Discovery Projects grants. He served as Deputy Head of the School of Psychology from 2002 to 2003 and Head from 2004 to 2006. He became a full Professor, founded the Newcastle Cognition Laboratory, and was awarded an ARC Professorial Fellowship in 2011 for full-time research.

His research examines human memory and skill acquisition, as well as neural and cognitive processes enabling rapid choices in areas including eye movements, memory, and linguistic knowledge, with models for difficult decisions under conflicting information, complex attributes, and confidence ratings. Key publications include 'The simplest complete model of choice response time: Linear ballistic accumulation' (Brown & Heathcote, 2008), 'The power law repealed: The case for an exponential law of practice' (Heathcote, Brown, & Mewhort, 2000), 'A consensus guide to capturing the ability to inhibit actions and impulsive behaviors in the stop-signal task' (Verbruggen et al., 2019), 'Analysis of response time distributions: an example using the Stroop task' (Heathcote, Popiel, & Mewhort, 1991), and 'An introduction to good practices in cognitive modeling' (Heathcote, Brown, & Wagenmakers, 2015). With an h-index of 58 and over 14,000 career citations, his work has shaped cognitive modeling and decision processes. Awards include the Andrew McGhie Memorial Prize for his PhD thesis (1990), election to the Australian Academy of Social Sciences (2012), and Fellowship of the Psychonomic Society (2013). He has organized Australasian Mathematical Psychology and Cognitive Science conferences, served on the Executive of the International Society for Mathematical Psychology, and held editorial roles such as Consulting Editor for Behavior Research Methods and Editorial Board member for Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.