Rate My Professor Damian Birney

Professor Damian Birney holds the position of Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney and serves as Associate Dean (Research Education) for the Faculty of Science. He earned a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from The University of Queensland in 2002 and has been affiliated with the University of Sydney since then, progressing through roles including Senior Researcher and Associate Professor since 2014. Birney leads the Cognitive Individual Differences and Training Lab, which examines the effectiveness of brain training for enhancing cognition and explores improvements in training methodologies.

His research specializations include working memory, fluid intelligence, expertise, reasoning, cognitive training, cognitive flexibility, metacognition, personality dynamics, and within-individual variation in cognitive performance. Funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project entitled 'Development of cognitive functions in adult populations', his lab collaborates with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on an innovative brain training app involving a large Australian sample. Notable publications encompass "Within-Individual Variation in Cognitive Performance Is Not Noise: Why and How Cognitive Assessments Should Examine Within-Person Performance" (2023), "Intelligence IS Cognitive Flexibility: Why Multilevel Models of Within-Individual Processes Are Needed to Realise This" (2022), "The Confidence Database" (2020), "Relational Processing is Fundamental to the Central Executive and is Limited to Four Variables" (2007), and "A meta-analysis and systematic review of reactivity to judgements of learning" (2018). With more than 2,426 citations on Google Scholar, Birney's contributions have advanced the fields of cognitive psychology and individual differences research. He supervises honours students on topics such as cognitive flexibility, working memory theory, and metacognition.